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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Oracle Instant Client – no chocolatey package for automatic install on Windows (yet?)

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/20

I tried finding a chocolatey package for the [WayBack] Oracle Instant Client – Free tools and libraries for connecting to Oracle Database.

The [WayBack] Instant Client editions support light-weight installations of the Oracle database client.

I was especially interested in automating the install of the basic or basic basic light varieties:

Instant Client Package

Description

References

Basic

All files required to run OCI, OCCI, and JDBC-OCI applications for Oracle Database

OCI
OCCI
JDBC-OCI

Basic Light

Smaller version of the Basic package, with only English error messages and Unicode, ASCII, and Western European character set support

OCI
OCCI
JDBC-OCI

Having this is a prerequisite of many DAC layers, including ODBC, although for the latter, you also need this one:

Instant Client Package

Description

References

ODBC

Additional libraries providing ODBC

ODBC

Since there is no chocolatey maintained package for any of these, these are the steps to download them:

  1. Ensure you have a Oracle account
  2. Sign in on www.oracle.com/webapps/redirect/signon?nexturl=https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-developer/downloads
  3. Accept cookies if asked for
  4. Click on the “Downloads” button to go to [WayBack] Oracle Instant Client Downloads
  5. Click on either [WayBack] Instant Client for Microsoft Windows (32-bit) (note that [WayBack] Instant Client for Microsoft Windows (x64) is specific for Win64 applications; many are 32-bit only, especially end-user ones, for instance many supporting Microsoft Office (including Outlook addins, or document storage systems)
  6. Click on the “Accept License Agreement” radio button
  7. Select the version you need.
  8. Download and install the required files.
  9. Unzip and add the directories to the PATH

TNSPING

Note that these downloads not include TNSPING; for some reason, Oracle only adds that to the fat client. So you need to use alternatives:

You can also use sqlplus with sscripting, but that is much harder on Windows than on Linux:

Note there are very distinctive differences between tnsping and sqlplus, see How to do tnsping? | Oracle Community  which I will quote large parts of soon.

For sqlplus: it works with TNSNAMES.ORA, but you can also do without it.

For all the other tnsping substitutes: ensure your TNS_ADMIN points to a directory with a correct TNSNAMES.ORA file.

What I usually do is this:

  1. Create directory a directory ORA under %LOCALAPPDATA%
  2. Store TNSNAMES.ORA inside %LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA
  3. Point TNS_ADMIN environment variable to %LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA
  4. Unzip any of the instantclient-basiclite-nt-*.zip into %LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA\InstantClient
  5. Unzip any of the instantclient-sqlplus-nt-*.zip into %LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA\SqlPlus
  6. Add %LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA\InstantClient;%LOCALAPPDATA%\ORA\SqlPlus to the user PATH

Related

My blog post Chocolatey: installing Oracle SQL Developer and updating the chocolatey package (which works without the instantclient).

[WayBack] Install Oracle Instant Client on Linux and Windows | HelloDog:  Install Oracle instantclient basic and instantclient sqlplus on Linux and Windows (and some tnsping examples).

[Archive.is] oracle – How to set tnsnames.ora location for SQL Developer in Windows 10 – Stack Overflow

–jeroen

This entry was posted on 2021/05/20 at 12:00 and is filed under Database Development, Development, ODBC, OracleDB, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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