Oracle on Rails

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…

2 Comments

1. J. Mihai — December 13, 2007

   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.

2. JOC — January 07, 2008

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