13 The Oracle Driver : Driver Requirements

Driver Requirements
This section provides the system requirements for using the Oracle driver on Windows, UNIX, and Linux.
IMPORTANT: You must have all components of the Oracle client software installed; otherwise, the driver will not operate properly. You must have the appropriate DLLs or shared libraries and objects on your path.
Although an earlier version of a client can access a later version of a database, for example, client 9i to server 10g, to ensure that you have access to all of the features of a particular database, you should use the client that matches the database version, for example, client 10g to server 10g.
NOTE: The Oracle driver supports Oracle 10g clients; however, the clients are not available for all operating systems supported by the driver. Consult the Oracle Web site for current client availability.
Windows
For 32-bit drivers, Oracle Net8 Client 9.2 or higher is required.
For 64-bit drivers, Oracle client software 10.1 or higher is required on x64.
UNIX and Linux
For 32-bit drivers, Oracle Net8 Client 9.2 or higher is required.
For 64-bit drivers, Oracle client software 9i R2 or higher is required on Linux for Itanium II and UNIX. Oracle client software 10.1 or higher is required for Linux on x64.
Before you can use the Oracle driver, you must have a supported Oracle client installed on your workstation in the $ORACLE_HOME source tree. ORACLE_HOME is an environment variable created by the Oracle installation process that identifies the location of your Oracle client components.
Set the environment variable ORACLE_HOME to the directory where you installed the Oracle client. For example, for C-shell users, the following syntax is valid:
setenv ORACLE_HOME /databases/oracle
For Bourne- or Korn-shell users, the following syntax is valid:
ORACLE_HOME=/databases/oracle;export ORACLE_HOME
32-bit drivers—Building the Required Oracle Net8 Shared Library on HP-UX 11
You must build a replacement shared library for Oracle Net8 Client 9.2 on HP-UX 11. This shared library, libclntsh.sl, contains your unique Oracle Net8 configuration, which is used by the Oracle driver to access local and remote Oracle databases.
The shared library libclntsh.sl is built by the Oracle script genclntsh. The genclntsh script provided by Oracle causes errors resulting from undefined symbols. Run the genclntsh92 script provided by Progress DataDirect to build a replacement libclntsh.sl. This script, in the src/oracle directory, places the new libclntsh.sl in ../../lib, which is your $ODBC_HOME/lib directory; it does not overwrite the original libclntsh.sl in the $ORACLE_HOME/lib directory.
Before you build the Oracle Net8 shared library, install Oracle and set the environment variable ORACLE_HOME to the directory where you installed Oracle.
For Oracle Net8 Client 9.2 on HP-UX 11, the following commands build the Oracle Net8 shared library:
cd ${ODBC_HOME}/src/oracle
genclntsh92
WARNING: The $ODBC_HOME/lib directory, containing the correct libclntsh library, must be on the SHLIB_PATH before $ORACLE_HOME/lib. Otherwise, the original Oracle library will be loaded, resulting in the unresolved symbol error.
Connecting to Oracle 9.2 from HP-UX
To connect to Oracle 9.2 from HP-UX, you must have the HP patch PHSS_22514 installed on the operating system, and you must set the LD_PRELOAD system variable to the absolute path of the libjava.sl library.