rider754 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear monks,

It seems like every instruction on installing DBD::Oracle involves the Oracle instantclient.

1. Is it bad practice to point to a different library location, say Oracle Forms & Report home or the database installation itself (I imagine there are probably a set of the library files there too)? If it's bad practice, can you give a simple explanation?
For example, the author at this blog suggests:

"I really recommend to use your own Oracle lib, since if DBAs upgrade or dismiss or whatever the official Oracle installation, you will need to be warned and to reinstall DBD::Oracle since it links to the Oracle shared libs."

2. Are there other concerns installing DBD::Oracle can change/break other default settings of the Oracle database?

Thanks
  • Comment on Can DBD::Oracle be installed without instantclient?

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Re: Can DBD::Oracle be installed without instantclient?
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 30, 2013 at 23:08 UTC

    Can DBD::Oracle be installed without instantclient?

    Probably. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/instant-client/index-100365.html says Instant Client allows you to run your applications without installing the standard Oracle client or having an ORACLE_HOME.

    So if you want more bigger files to download and manage, you can do that

    Is it bad practice to point to a different library location,

    It depends. If you're on a machine where the sysadmin/dba/whomever likes to upgrade oracle client without updating everything else that depends on it (DBD::Oracle), its a good practice to protect yourself

    Otherwise it seems like a little extra work

    2. Are there other concerns installing DBD::Oracle can change/break other default settings of the Oracle database?

    No

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