Monday, July 27, 2009

Installing Oracle on RHEL 5 (32 and 64 bit) - Part 3

In part one of this series, we got the operating system ready for the installation of Oracle. In part two, we got Oracle installed and running. In this, our final (for now) post on Oracle and Linux, we'll look at some of the tweaks that make it better, as well as some of the surprising bumps one encounters when using Oracle on Linux.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Installing Oracle on RHEL 5 (32 and 64 bit) - Part 2

In part one of this series, we got the operating system ready for the installation of Oracle. In this post, we'll actually install Oracle and get it up and running. In part three, we'll look at some of the things you can do to make Oracle a bit more usable on the Linux platform. Oracle recommends using the GUI installer. I think they're right: it's the most accessible way to get Oracle installed. If you only have remote access to your system, and SSH is the only remote access you've got, you can set up VNC reasonably quickly to have remote GUI access to your system.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Installing Oracle on RHEL 5 (32 and 64 bit) - Part 1

With the then-hyped Oracle Enterprise Linux rollout, and Ellison's evident disdain for Microsoft, you'd have thought that Oracle would go out of their way to make it straightforward to install and use Oracle database on Linux. It's not so, unfortunately. Not that it can't--or shouldn't--be done, mind you: it works great; you just need some persistence. This is part one of a three-part series on Oracle on Linux. This post looks at getting the OS ready for Oracle. Part 2 looks at installing the database software, and Part 3 talks about some of the things that can be done to make running and maintaining Oracle easier on Linux. Oracle has a document here that does a pretty good job of outlining the steps necessary to install Oracle on linux. I quibble with some of their instructions, particularly their directions to use the package rpms from the Oracle install CD. If they're going to go to the trouble of providing the requisite rpms, it seems like they'd also install them during the installation process, if they're needed. Instead, it seems like a *much* better option to install them from your repository (CENTOS or RedHat are most pertinent to this guide). They also have you using rpm, which is fine, but it won't find dependencies for you like yum will. In any case, I do recommend that document for additional information. It's my hope that this series will help navigate the installation process and make it easier. I've broken this into several posts so as to keep the length of each one a little smaller, anyway. In this post, we'll get the OS prepped and ready for the

Monday, July 13, 2009

ORA-00911 when writing a query for SSIS

Coming from the Oracle world, I'm in the habit of putting a semicolon at the end of all of my SQL queries. Not a good idea when you're writing an Oracle query for import/export in SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services).

The problem is that SSIS takes care of that for you, and you'll get an entirely unhelpful "ORA-00911: invalid character" error message.
Just remove that final semicolon, and you should be in OK shape.

If you find yourself needing to do multiple SQL statements in one execute SQL task (for instance), you can use the GO separator instead of semicolons.

Note that GO has to be on its own line:
select 'this is sql statement 1' from dual
go
select 'this is sql statement 2' from dual
go

For the curious, GO is a SQL Server-specific batch keyword that is used to separate different SQL batches. It wouldn't normally be something you'd consider using in an Oracle query, but it works in this case.