Guidelines for installing perl dbi/dbd in Solaris10

DBI

installing perl dbi, must be done as root

perl -MCPAN -e shell

If running cpan for the first time, it will ask you a bunch of questions.  For the most

part, just accept the defaults.  The only thing I change is to make sure to automatically

include all dependent modules.  If it asks for some mirrors to connect to, pick ones in

North America.  I usually choose mirrors that look like they are ISPs, not .edu domain

mirrors.  Choose at least 4 or 5.  With 5.12, it seems to choose for you.

once you are at the cpan> prompt, install DBI:

cpan> install DBI

it downloads and installs and tests DBI.  If there are any other modules it relies on that we don't have yet, they

will be downloaded and installed also.  DBI install should be pretty simple.

DBD

To install DBD::oracle we will not use the CPAN shell environment.  The big

prerequsite for DBD::oracle is to have the Oracle binaries already installed on the host.

Download DBD::oracle from here: http://search.cpan.org/search%3fmodule=DBD::Oracle, then ungzip/untar it.  Make

the directory that it creates and everything underneath writeable and accessible by user oracle.

At a minimum, this is what will need to be done:

1.            Become user oracle and source one of the most recent .profile_* files in the Oracle homedir.

2.            run these commands successfully:

                                perl Makefile.PL

                                make

                If these 2 commands run, you are almost home free.

3.            Try to run "make test".  It will fail anyways because there is no database account set up, this is ok.

                If it fails at a step before that, then you have some other problem.

4.            Become root and cd back into the DBD::oracle install directory, and run "make install".

Complications:

                1)            The C compiler version that the above commands are run under must be the

                                same version that was used to build perl.  Use "perl -V" to see the compiler

                                version used to build perl.  Either gcc or perl might need to be upgraded in

                                order to get them to match.

                2)            There may not be an existing .profile_* file to use.  You can try copying one from

                                another host, and then modifying it as needed to change to existing dirs for ORACLE_HOME

                                and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and similar vars.  Or you can ask a DBA to create a .profile_something

                                for you.  They may ask which DB instance this is for.  To be honest, we don't really care.

                                One env var that Perl DBI::DBD does not use is ORACLE_SID.

                3)            Not all of the oracle code has been installed, such that DBD::oracle does not compile.

                                Ask a DBA to install more of the oracle code.

                4)            Conflicts between 32 and 64 bit versions of libraries and code.  Everything needs to be

                                either 32 bit or 64 bit, you can't mix and match.  If the perl we are using is 32 bit, then

                                the libraries DBD::oracle needs to bring in must also be 32 bit.  if I do "file /usr/bin/perl",

                                it will report the whether it is 32bit or 64 bit. re-ordering of env vars like LD_LIBRARY_PATH

                                may be necessary so that 32 bit libraries are first.  You may also need to go in and tweak the

Makefile so that it refers to 32 bit libraries instead of 64 bit libraries.  A very painful solution might

be that we have to recompile perl as a 64 bit application.

                5)            Whenever there are complications, and you want to make another attempt to reinstall, you should

                                do a “make clean”, and then begin again by running “perl Makefile.PL”.