Daniel Morrison

Oracle on Rails

written by daniel on December 14th, 2006 @ 05:37 PM

Today I had the ~~pleasure~~ experience of setting up Rails to work with an Oracle Database.

There are good tutorials out there to help. The best that I found was this one by carsonm at Mission Data.

A few notes of my own:

I had no luck, until I removed the trailing / in ORACLE_HOME, then everything Just Worked.
Read the directions carefully. There are some important bits that are easy to miss.
Don’t try to install on an Intel Mac. Its not worth your effort (as of this writing). I thought I’d be smart and get Oracle working on my MacBook Pro before trying on the server. There are a couple places where you have to deviate from the instructions for a Mac (nothing difficult), but in the end you get punished for having an Intel Mac.
- If you to try to install on a Mac, follow the instructions above, and change the symlink in Step 2 to ln -s libclntsh.dylib.10.1 libclntsh.dylib
- In Step 3, change LD_LIBRARY_PATH to DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH.
- There may be others. This is where I got punished and gave up.
In newer versions of Rails you must set the adapter to “oracle” instead of “oci” in your database.yml

It’s clear to me now how Oracle keeps consultants employed…

J. Mihai on 13 Dec 08:34

Thanks for the information, its really useful for me since I am gathering a resources in this domain. Lookin forward tot reading more of your posts.
JOC on 07 Jan 16:33

Like J.Mihai was saying …many thanks Daniel for this resource. Very useful.