Installing Oracle

 This page is a working document. Oracle support hasn't been fully tested yet.

Added in version 3.1.0.

Requirements

• An Oracle database with an account that has full privileges
• Oracle database client
• DBD::Oracle

You should set the Oracle table character coding to "utf-8".

Installing Oracle Express Edition

This is only required if you wish to use the free Oracle DB for testing/development purposes.

See Oracle on Ubuntu.

Adding Oracle Environment Variables

Make life with Oracle easier by adding the Oracle environment variables to the global system profile.

Create /etc/profile.d/oracle.sh (replace 10.2.0 with the correct version for your Oracle server/client):

ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
ORACLE_SID=XE
PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export ORACLE_HOME
export ORACLE_SID
export PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

You will need to log out/in for this change to take effect.

GQLPlus

The sqlplus tool has very poor shell support. For a better shell tool use gqlplus.

Installation

Install EPrints as normal but don't create a (MySQL) database.

Edit archives/[repoid]/cfg/cfg.d/database.pl to add the Oracle configuration:

   #$c->{dbname} = 'eprints';
   #$c->{dbhost} = 'localhost';
   #$c->{dbport} = undef;
   #$c->{dbsock} = undef;
   $c->{dbdriver} = 'Oracle';
   $c->{dbhost} = 'localhost';
   $c->{dbsid} = 'XE';
   $c->{dbuser} = 'HR';
   $c->{dbpass} = 'HR';

dbsid is the name of the Oracle database.

Create the database and import subjects:

./bin/epadmin create_tables [repoid]
./bin/import_subjects [repoid]
./bin/epadmin create_user [repoid]

Continue configuring EPrints.

Troubleshooting

Depending on your server configuration you may find you need to set environment variables for DBD::Oracle to find your Oracle client:

export ORACLE_SID=XE
export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

At the moment starting the indexer from the Admin page doesn't work, due to the Oracle environment variables not being present.