Impossible to setup and establish Oracle 9i/10g/11g/12c – OCI connection

by May 26, 2017

Data Studio 18.0.12-5 64-bit for Linux
OS: Fedora-25 Linux 64-bit
Database: 64-bit Oracle 12c Release 2 (12.2.0.1)

Hello,

it is impossible to setup and establish Oracle 12.2 OCI connection using your “copy method” instructions for 12c. Your instructions are either wrong or outdated. First and foremost there is no ojdbc7.jar in Oracle 12.2 installation. There is ojdbc8.jar, but not ojdbc7.jar. So, according to your instructions I deleted your original ojdbc7.jar and orai18n.jar in /opt/datastudio/lib/drivers directory and copied $ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/ojdbc8.jar and $ORACLE_HOME/jlib/orai18n.jar to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable includes path to oci client directory where libociei.so resides. The same path is also included in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf configuration file (for ldconfig). But starting datastudio and trying to register server using 12c OCI connection (sys as sysdba) is mission impossible. Connection test fails with the message that ojdbc14.jar is missing. The ojdbc14.jar file doesn’t exist in Oracle 12.2 installation!!! It exists in Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Cloud Control installation, but this fact has nothing to do with 12c OCI setup in Data Studio. I was lucky to have OEM 13c Cloud Control already installed on my system, so I grabbed the ojdbc14.jar from it and copied it to datastudio drivers directory. The 12c OCI connection finally succeeded and now everything works fine.

There is yet another problem with this insecure and confusing “copy method”. When I relocate the whole OCI working datastudio installation to another location (let’s say copy the whole /opt/datastudio to /usr/local/datastudio) and start datastudio from that location, the 12c OCI connection fails again, as if it had never been setup and established. This is really barmy. OCI works from /opt/datastudio, but not from /usr/local/datastudio, although everything is the same and identical.

With all due respect I found this “copy method” pretty confusing, outdated and totally unnecessary. All datastudio need to know is the path to Oracle client home or Oracle instantclient home. That’s all and that’s how the vast majority of applications works with Oracle database if OCI driver is used. To setup and establish the 12.2 OCI connection in Oracle SQL Developer it is quite enough to pick up the client or instantclient home directory via a browse button in dialog box.

Regards,

Niksa Jurinovic
niksa@jurinovic.com