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.

DBI and DBD::Oracle

Installing the DBI is always easy – regardless if you’re running Windows or Linux. Just follow the steps.

1. Get root password if you don’t already have one: sudo passwd root
2. Switch to root: su -
3. Run CPAN: perl -MCPAN -e shell
4. Check if DBI is already installed: m DBI
5. If it’s not installed, install it: install DBI

That should do the trick for the DBI. The DBD::Oracle is a bit more complicated and we’ll just use CPAN to download it for us. The rest is manual.

1. Check for DBD::Oracle: m DBD::Oracle
2. Download it: get DBD::Oracle
3. Exit CPAN: q

Now we should have the DBD::Oracle distribution downloaded to our CPAN build directory. If you don’t know where to find it, look for .cpan dir under your root home or (if you started CPAN for the first time doing sudo from your main user, look for it under your main user’s home directory). We’ll leave that distro aside for a moment and work on the other pre-requisites.

Oracle Instant Client

Download the instant client packages you’ll need. I chose to download the RPMs and convert them to .deb files using alien. Oracle also provides .zip files if you don’t want to do it the alien way.

Oracle Instant Client Download Site i386
Oracle Instant Client Download Site AMD64 32- and 64-bit

Accept the license agreement by clicking the Accept radio button. Since the i386 and amd64 files have different names, check the bold words in the file names to know which ones to download (the names below are for the i386 platform). Also, if you don’t have a user_id for Oracle, you’ll be prompted to register one once you click the link. It’s free of charge.

• oracle-instantclient11.1-basic-xx.x.x.x.x-x.i386.rpm
• oracle-instantclient11.1-sqlplus-xx.x.x.x.x-x.i386.rpm
• oracle-instantclient11.1-devel-xx.x.x.x.x-x.i386.rpm

AMD64 has only zip files from what I could find, and they’re named a bit differently, too (remove the 32 for the 64-bit version:

• instantclient-basic-linuxAMD64-32-xx.x.x.x.x-yyyymmdd.zip
• instantclient-sqlplus-linuxAMD64-32-xx.x.x.x.x-yyyymmdd.zip
• instantclient-sdk-linuxAMD64-32-xx.x.x.x.x-yyyymmdd.zip

Note: Extract the zips into a directory called instantclient and skip to the Set Up your Environment Variables section if you’re using the AMD64 or i386 zip files.

Install alien and libaio

Now is the time to install alien, which is an application that converts rpm files into .deb format to be used with dpkg. Instant Client also requires libaio. Both can be installed through the Synaptic Package Manager. Just open it, look for alien, mark it for install and do the same for libaio and libaio-dev. Once they’re installed, you’re good to move on to install the Instant Client. Just don’t forget to exit Synaptic Package Manager, since we’ll be using dpkg and it won’t work if Synaptic is open.

Install Oracle Instant Client

First step to install Oracle Instant Client from rpm files is to convert them into .deb files. Do that with alien by running the following command (from a command line in the directory where you downloaded your RPMs):

$ sudo alien --scripts *.rpm

It takes a little while to run, so be patient. Once it’s complete, install the newly created .deb files:

$ dpkg -i *.deb

Set up your Environment Variables

The nasty thing about rpm files is that it’s not always easy to know where the files were installed. If you opted for the zip file approach, your install will most definitely be different. For RPM install, add this to your .bashrc file (swap xx.x for your oracle version):


export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xx.x/client
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib


Update: If you get an ELFCLASS64 error, try setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to $ORACLE_HOME/lib32 instead.

Reload your .bashrc file:
$. ~/.bashrc

Note: by default, Oracle Instant Client doesn’t come with a tnsnames.ora file or the directory structure where it’s usually found. We’ll have to create that ourselves -

$ mkdir -p $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin; touch $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora

Install DBD::Oracle

It’s time to finally install DBD::Oracle. Go to your CPAN build directory and cd into DBD-Oracle-*. As a user having the environment variable set from the previous section, run Makefile.PL portion.

$ perl Makefile.PL

There’s no need to set INC or LIB with the alien approach, but if you run into any issues, try giving Makefile.PL the path to your include dir for INC, and lib dir for LIB.

Next, run

$ make.

It will raise a few warnings, but unless it exits with an error, you should be OK.

The next logical step is to run make test. However, this will undoubtedly fail unless you have a valid entry in your tnsnames.ora file. If you don’t, you can skip this test and hope that everything works later on. Otherwise, update your tnsnames.ora file with a valid entry, and set one more environment variable before running the test:

$ export ORACLE_USERID="user/passwd@tns_entry_name"
$ make test

This is usually the hardest part to pass with total success. Many things can go wrong. In my case, the valid entry I use doesn’t have full grants to the user I log in as. This always triggers an error on the create/access sequences portion of the testing. I simply ignore it nowadays – make sure you analyze your test results thoroughly before choosing to ignore the errors as well.

Now that the testing is over, simply run
$ make install
as a super user and you’re all set!

Book suggestions:

I started learning Perl back in 1998 by myself. What made it possible for me to do that was that Perl scripts, like shell scripts, are not compiled binaries. You can open it with a (good) text editor and see exactly what the programmer did to make it work. Same thing with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and all other democratic languages around. No reverse-engineering needed.

Speaking of Web technologies, Perl was considered SO GOOD with manipulating texts, that it was once the #1 language for CGIs. For those of you who don’t know, CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface and it was the way websites could show dynamic data back in the early days of the Internet. In fact, Perl was so popular with CGIs, that many people didn’t (and still don’t) know it could do anything else. On the contrary, although Perl has excellent Web modules such as Catalyst, Template::Toolkit, HTML::Mason, and so many others, it’s not my first choice for Web development (for reasons that are not in the scope of this course). However, I can’t live without it for anything else.

Perl is portable: you can write one script and run it in just about any Operating System that has a Perl interpreter installed. And you can find Perl interpreters for practically all the OS’s around.

Perl is fast: although the Perl interpreter needs to read, parse, compile, and run the script on every execution, it’s still VERY fast by any standard.

Perl gets faster: there are ways to bypass the first 3 stages of the Perl execution, either by using mod_perl for Apache, or by using the Perl Archive Toolkit, which gives you a precompiled (albeit potentially large) binary of your script.

Perl is Object Oriented: ok, that didn’t sound right. Perl can be used from either a procedural or an object oriented scope. In real world applications, you’re likely to mix both cases to suit your needs.

Perl is extremely high level: this means that given the statements in your script, you are likely to be able to read them as you would plain English. This was done on purpose, of course, given the fact that Larry Wall is a linguist.

Perl is free: you can download it with no cost from several distributors, install, and use for any purpose – commercial or otherwise and not have to worry about licensing.

Perl is free form: you can write the code practically in any way you like and get away with it. This is great as long as you keep in mind that writing good code also means writing clean code. You can seriously hurt your foot if you’re not careful. Obfuscation is only fun when it’s intentional.

I can go on forever telling you all that Perl can do, especially if I decide to talk about CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network – a website with over 10,000 modules for everything you can think of, from complex math and graphic manipulation to fooling around with the Klingon language. You can even use the Perl/Tk to create graphical user interfaces.

If what I said so far was enough to interest you to learn Perl, then keep on reading. There’s something to the language that feels almost addictive, if you don’t let all the non-initiated folks make up your mind against it…

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