I was recently involved in upgrading our Application servers to the latest Oracle Instant Client 11.g (11.2.0.1) including installing the latest PHP
OCI8 module (1.4.1).
Currently Oracle provides binaries for Linux in RPM and ZIP(?) format. (Side note: It still puzzles me as to why Oracle uses ZIP files for Linux binaries as ZIP is common to Windows and is not always available or generally used on Linux.)
I thought I was well prepared for the upgrade and we had enough time allocated to do some other maintenance tasks in the same window as well so I wasn't worried. I made all the prep work before hand and I was all set. This was going to be a piece of cake. I've done this sort of setup in Development and a bunch of other servers a number of times. I have even created my own setup and steps involved for the whole process. Including a patch to make things easier during the configure process.
A couple of interesting things happened though:
1. RPMs that Oracle provides are broken. They don't define all the required dependencies that they need. I saw this on a cpl of systems where after installing the RPM packages and running sqlplus I was told that a library was missing and that sqlplus couldn't start. This is how I remembered that I also need libaio to be installed.
2. When trying to do 'pear upgrade pecl/oci8' I ran into a rather weird issue. I got a ton of errors and the package wouldn't compile. This had me scratching my head for a little while. As it turns out I had set ORACLE_HOME in my environment (I guess I should document as to what I was trying to achieve by using ORACLE_HOME) and this screwed up configure script. So configure script managed to find the libraries for linking but didn't do sufficient checking for the include directory as it though that a full oracle client was installed. When trying to make it failed to locate oci.h which in turn triggered a ton of errors and warnings.
LESSON: Make sure you unset or never set ORACLE_HOME when trying to compile oci8 from PECL.
3. I had Oracle Instant Client 11.1 installed on another box. This one is an Ubuntu (Debian DEB packaging) VM. Since this was a production server I was trying to take a safe approach. So I used alien to convert RPMs to Debs and then uninstalled everything but 11.1 basic. Then i went and installed 11.2 DEbs along side which was fine until I tried to remove 11.1 basic package. All hell broke loose as it turns out that during conversion Alien found Oracle Instant Client 11.1 and made that a dependency of Oracle Instant Client 11.2. I had to remove 11.1 completely and run alien again to rebuild the DEBs. This was a big surprise to me. I sure hope that Oracle starts producing DEBs along side RPMS.
On the positive side I still managed to complete all of my tasks during the maintenance window. I was also lucky enough that we allocated enough time for the maintenance itself. After talking to one of our Sys Admins (SA's) it might have been a good thing that I was doing the upgrade as SAs are not always knowledgeable as to why things break on the Oracle Client side. Also specific knowledge that ORACLE_HOME can break things that bad is also a little known fact.
I hope somebody finds these notes useful and is able to save a ton of time not repeating these mistakes.
Gena01
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