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Tag Archives: CPAN

Perl: Installing DBD::Oracle + Oracle Instant Client on Ubuntu 9.04

A couple of weeks ago I finally got a new laptop at work – which meant of course that I had to reinstall everything. Although we use Windows XP, there’s one app that I have to run through Linux. The solution was Sun’s VirtualBox running Ubuntu 9.04. When I tried to run the app, I realized that I still needed to install DBI and DBD::Oracle – which brings me to this article. Nothing better than a reinstall to generate article material :)

DBD::Oracle is usually a pain to install if you haven’t already done it a gazillion times. After that, it’s just an annoying itch. In this article I’ll cover installing DBD::Oracle using Oracle Instant Client, Ubuntu 9.04, and Perl 5.10. Since we’re using the Instant Client, you’ll need some Oracle DB you can connect to in order to do the testing. You can choose to skip testing altogether, but you might be into a surprise later. Continue reading →

Perl and MQSeries for the faint of heart

Today I managed to finally get Perl to put and get messages to MQ Series. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time, but didn’t have the time or even MQ knowledge to do so.

This post is intended for those who, like me, aren’t MQSeries gurus and can’t make much of the documentation of the MQSeries module in CPAN. I hope it serves you well. Continue reading →

Perl Crash Course: Pragmas, Perl Modules, and CPAN

I always like to say that 90% of Perl is its modules. Back in 2000 when I was working as a junior Perl programmer I was asked to write a web application that, among other things, could send contact messages through email. Unfortunately, I never had anyone to really teach me the Path of Perl – I only relied on Learning Perl by Randall Schwartz, and whatever I could find on the net. I had a really hard time with that application, mainly because I didn’t know about Perl modules, MySQL and SQL language. Had I been familiar with at least the Perl modules part, I wouldn’t have had to spend 8 days and nights in the office (including my birthday). I didn’t even know how to use strict; at the time! Keep reading if use strict; makes no sense to you.

Being the extensible and flexible language that it is, Perl provides us with some safeguards and helpers to assist in avoiding what happened to me (I wish I knew that back then). The first of which I’ll talk about is Pragmas.
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Perl: Installing MQSeries CPAN module on Windows XP

Installing MQSeries module on Windows XP is a piece of cake, as long as you get the right tools before you even try.

Update: July 2, 2009 I had to install the module on a new computer running Windows XP and it looks like I had missed a few steps in the original how-to below. It’s been updated with the manual editing steps. From step 3 down, it’s all new.

This is what you need:

  1. MQSeries installed (get the 90-day trial version here. You will need to register, but there’s no charge for that)
  2. Microsoft Visual C++ (it’s free, and you can get it here)
  3. Perl (I use ActiveState)

Steps to get it installed:

  1. Open a command prompt (Start->Run->cmd.exe)
  2. (Extremely important!!)Set up your build environment by running vcvarsall.bat. Mine is under C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 9.0VC
    An alternative to this step is to open a Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt (Start->All Programs->Microsoft C++ 2008 Express Edition->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt)
  3. Make sure your environment variables are set with MQ data: INCLUDE=pathtotoolscinclude directory, LIB=pathtotoolslib directory (typing set will show you your env vars)
  4. Install pre-requisite Params::Validate by running perl -MCPAN -e “install Params::Validate”
  5. Download MQSeries manually by running perl -MCPAN -e “get MQSeries”
  6. cd into the directory where you have your cpan (mine is c:Perlcpanbuild) and enter MQSeries-x.xx-* (where * is a series of random chars if you’re using the latest CPAN)
  7. With a decent text editor (I’m using Notepad++ and also like Crimson Editor and Programmer’s Notepad 2), edit CONFIG file: uncomment MQMTOP = … and replace the path with the path to your MQ Tools directory. It’s OK to use long directory and file names (e.g c:Program FilesIBMWebsphere MQTools)
  8. Now cd into the utils directory, open parse_headers file and comment out or delete the line near the top where it says “my $include = ‘/opt/mqm/inc’;”. The reason for this is that my overwrites the $include variable previously populated by parse_config file.
  9. Save your changes and in the base directory for the MQSeries build, run perl Makefile.PL. It might complain about some libs not being found, but that wasn’t a show stopper for me.
  10. Run nmake. It came with your MS Visual C++ install and should be in your PATH.
  11. Run nmake test. It’ll fail, since you didn’t set any valid data in the CONFIG file. If you have any valid data such as QM and Queues to test it with, go ahead and set them in the CONFIG file and run nmake test again. If not, that’s OK.
  12. If nmake test was the only place where it failed, then you’re good to run nmake install.

That’s it – Perl MQSeries module should now be installed.

Perl: Connecting to an Oracle database WITHOUT having an installed client

I started this post with the intention of having it be a quickie, just showing people how to connect to Oracle with Perl/DBI without having to have Oracle client or even Perl installed, but it’s not that simple.  So I decided to rewrite it with detailed instructions.

Here is a list of what I used:

Machine: Sun Solaris SPARC on build and target machines
Oracle: Oracle 10g client (build machine only)
Perl: v. 5.10.0 (build machine only)
Perl modules: DBI (1.607), DBD::Oracle (1.22), PAR (0.983), pp (0.982), PerlIO (1.04) (build machine only)

Continue reading →