Installing Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition on Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon

As Trampoline Systems is doing "Enterprise" software we don't have a luxury of choosing whatever database we want (most likely mysql or postgresql, at least as far am I'm concerned), but need to support whichever database our customers use. I don't think there's any objective reason for customers being interested in database used by application any more than they should be interested in its programming language or ORM library, but for some reason the current tradition says that in "Enterprise" software applications can use any programming language and ORM they want, but the customer determines the database.

Now some people who never tried it claim that moving Rails application from one database to another is just a matter of a single line configuration change. How do I know they never tried it ? Because we did. At the very least it requires all tests to be run twice, once with mysql and the second time with Oracle. And number of things which work differently is just enormous. To make things worse most people here use Intel Macs, and there are not even Oracle clients for them, let alone servers, so when any problems happen they need to be fixed on a Linux server over ssh or on a borrowed Windows machine. It all works, but it's far from trivial.

Now since I wiped out OSX on my machine and installed Ubuntu, I thought I might be able to install Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition on it. Unfortunately Ubuntu is not an officially supported platform for Oracle, and Express Edition is apparently different enough that we don't want to use it. In the end it all worked quite less with just a little bit of hacking.

First you need to get Linux installer (10201_database_linux32.zip) and unpack it. The installer relies on some binaries being in /bin instead of /usr/bin so you need to make a few links.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk

Now you need to add a "nobody" group. Debian-based system use nobody.nogroup instead of nobody.nobody, but we aren't losing any security by creating an extra group.

$ sudo addgroup nobody

Now enter installer directory (database), and run the installer. There are many questions, but they are straightforward to answer even if you know little about Oracle. You do not need to do it as root.

$ ./runInstaller -ignoresysprereqs

After you do that the installer will ask you to run two scripts as root. Paths to these scripts (shown in installer dialog) depend on your system, for me they were:

$ sudo /home/taw/oraInventory/orainstRoot.sh
$ sudo /home/taw/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/root.sh

Now test if it works with your Rails. If it doesn't due to being unable to load oci8lib.so either recompile OCI8, or more easily add the following line to your .bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/taw/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/lib/

By this point you should have Oracle working. The only thing missing is getting it working again after reboot. Just create a /etc/init.d/oracle like this one (correct path and oracle account):

#!/bin/bash

ORACLE_HOME=/home/taw/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1
ORACLE_OWNR=taw

# if the executables do not exist -- display error

if [ ! -f $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart -o ! -d $ORACLE_HOME ]
then
       echo "Oracle startup: cannot start"
       exit 1
fi

# depending on parameter -- startup, shutdown, restart
# of the instance and listener or usage display

case "$1" in
   start)
       # Oracle listener and instance startup
       echo -n "Starting Oracle: "
       su - $ORACLE_OWNR -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start"
       su - $ORACLE_OWNR -c $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart
       touch /var/lock/subsys_oracle
       echo "OK"
       ;;
   stop)
       # Oracle listener and instance shutdown
       echo -n "Shutdown Oracle: "
       su - $ORACLE_OWNR -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop"
       su - $ORACLE_OWNR -c $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut
       rm -f /var/lock/subsys_oracle
       echo "OK"
       ;;
   reload|restart)
       $0 stop
       $0 start
       ;;
   *)
       echo "Usage: $0 start|stop|restart|reload"
       exit 1
esac
exit 0

and create symlinks to it:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/oracle /etc/rc0.d/K01oracle
$ sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/oracle /etc/rc2.d/S99oracle
$ sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/oracle /etc/rc6.d/K01oracle