Installing Oracle 9i on Mac OS X, Part 2
Pages: 1, 2, 3
You will need to read at least some of the Oracle documentation.
Nobody can complain that Oracle doesn't provide enough documentation for their database. There are 118 HTML/PDF reference books provided on the documentation CD for the production Windows version of Oracle 9.2.0. This info is also available via the Web at tahiti.oracle.com (there is no www prefix to this URL). The "getting started" link at the top of the Oracle 9.2 documentation page is a good place to start in order to read about the duties of a database administrator, developer, network administrator, or security officer. Each of these topics includes links to a subset of the entire list of books.
As a DBA, I find that I generally need to be familiar with almost all of the books to some extent even if I have not completely read each of them. This way I can suggest appropriate topics for reading and examples for various people I work with who need to access, maintain, or write programs for the database.
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Related Reading Learning Unix for Mac OS X |
Once a database license and support contract are purchased, an additional set of information resources becomes available via Oracle's Metalink website. It is often very helpful to be able to perform a quick search of Metalink when a new or unusual error message is logged by the database. The Metalink search provides a search of previous issues submitted by customers via the Metalink forums, knowledge base records, white papers, and example documentation. If a Metalink search does not produce results. then a Google web/newsgroup search is a good second choice. There is also a built in error number reporter included on UNIX systems (even in Developer Release 1). For example if the error is ORA-32006, you type the following in the Terminal window:
oerr ora 32006And you get the following response:
32006, 00000, "%s initialization parameter has been deprecated"
// *Cause: A deprecated parameter was specified at startup
// *Action: Consult Oracle documentation to find new parameters
// to use instead.Summary for FileMaker developers:
There are many items to consider when contemplating a migration from FileMaker to Oracle. If you have the budget and need for a high performance and highly scalable database, then Oracle would make a great choice. There is a wealth of information in the form of books, Web sites, and consultants for Oracle databases. Oracle's own technical support service is also an excellent reason to consider Oracle. But if your budget can't afford an Oracle database, then a more economical alternative such as MySQL using a Mac OS X graphical front-end application like SQL4X Manager is worth considering. Future production releases of MySQL 4.0.X will even include replication and online backup features. OpenBase and FrontBase are additional commercial alternatives available for Mac OS X, which offer database replication and online backup features.
Final thoughts
The availability of the Oracle database for Mac OS X is a significant event for Apple. Even in its development release status, Oracle 9.2 for Mac OS X is functionally very complete and suitable for testing and evaluation. Its modest hardware requirements make it a viable install even for the laptop of a DBA or software developer.
Glossary of Terms
Instance: An instance is one running copy of the Oracle executable software. You can run multiple copies of the Oracle executable on the same computer with the appropriate amount of memory, disk space, processing power and configuration steps. You can even run different versions of the database on the same server.
SQL: Structured Query Language. These are the commands available to manage data and objects within the database. These commands are broken up into DML (Data Manipulation Language) and DDL (Data Definition Language) commands. The DML commands are used to query, insert, and delete information. The DDL commands are used to make structural changes to the database such as creating the database itself, adding/dropping tables, tablespaces and columns.
PL/SQL: This is an Oracle specific procedural language that is compiled and stored either within the database or externally by the gcc compiler for higher performance. Many of the newest database features are actually written in PL/SQL. As features become more popular or require higher performance they are re-written in C and incorporated into the core of the database.
SqlPlus: SqlPlus provides a command line interface to startup, shutdown, create, query, and maintain the database. This little explanation doesn't really do justice to the complete functionality of SqlPlus. There are entire books written about SqlPlus.
Oerr: This handy little command line utility prints out the text of error messages for Oracle databases running on UNIX servers. This way you don't have to go searching the Error messages manual in order to read a quick summary of the error message text. There may be additional info located within the Error messages HTML manual, and searching Metalink is also helpful if you need more info.
Book References
- Mac OS X for Unix Geeks
- Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 3nd Edition
- Oracle SqlPlus - The Definitive Guide
- Oracle SQL: The Essential Reference
- Oracle Essentials: Oracle 9i, Oracle 8i and Oracle 8
- Programming the Perl DBI
- Perl for Oracle DBAs
- Learning UNIX for Mac OSX
Other Resources
otn.oracle.com - Discussion Forums - Technologies > Platforms > Apple. (Requires free OTN membership account)
David Simpson is president of .com Solutions Inc. and the developer of the Installgen application.
Related articles:
Installing Oracle 9i on Mac OS X, Part 1 -- The Oracle 9i Developer Release for Mac OS X opens up a new world of corporate database management for both Apple and Oracle. David Simpson begins this series with a look at the issues for DBAs who are considering making the move to Oracle on OS X.
Return to the Mac DevCenter.
Showing messages 1 through 14 of 14.
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Installation steps of Oracle Client
2003-04-06 15:09:26 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Given the title of this article I had expected to find detailed installation steps that honestly I didn't find, so I'm a bit disappointed.
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dbi and DBD:Oracle
2002-12-19 13:47:31 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
I see you refer in this article about using perl/dbi with DBD::Oracle. i had to download and build my own dbi and that works and tests ok, but the DBD::Oracle does not run. there is a thread on oracle website about this and several other people have bounced on this as well. Any chance you can share how you get this to work on os x ;-) PLEASE!!!
thanks jim
hopperj@macconnect.com
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Oracle runs fine on jaguar
2002-12-18 13:46:38 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
I just installed it on jaguar, i have no experience installing jaguar and it was not to hard.
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Will you get to the installation details already?
2002-12-11 12:06:46 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Jeez. What a tremendously weak article. I don't care about the licensing details, or FileMaker nonsense.
Would you PLEASE stop hovering around the need and post the actual install steps already!!!
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OSX server or Jaguar
2002-12-02 08:35:45 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Will 9i run on Jaguar? or do you need OSX server? I want play with it on 1 GHz G4 power mac along with all the regular Mac apps.
calliex@mac.com
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WebObjects Trial *is* downloadable
2002-11-26 08:01:14 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
The article incorrectly states that Apple doesn't provide a trial of WebObjects. In fact it does provide a downloadable 30 day trial for Mac or PC. I recommend downloading it and trying the online tutorials.
http://www.apple.com/webobjects/ has a box near the top left with a link to the trial version. -
WebObjects Trial *is* downloadable
2002-11-26 18:00:22 dsimpson1 [Reply | View]
Thanks for this updated info. It looks like this is a whole new set of web pages for WebObjects 5.2. Click on the "Getting Started" link near the top of any of the WebObjects pages, and they discuss the 30 day demo. They then link you over to the Apple Developer Connection web site.
It is terrific that Apple is now providing this 30 day demo version - it is a great way for developers to try out the software.
David Simpson
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Oracle does not support application developers
2002-11-23 19:36:54 ygor [Reply | View]
I am working on a project in Linux that collects data from hardware and puts it into an Oracle database.
The tools I am trying to use are Oracle Call Interface (OCI) and Oracle C++ Call Interface (OCCI).
Oracle does not want programmers like me working down at the OCI/OCCI level. These API's are sparsely documented and poorly supported.
Also, an "Oracle Installation" is a huge beast with many bells and whistles that are unused by anyone less than a mega-corporate enterprise level user.
I find MySQL much easier to program to and much more configurable to one's needs and requirements. -
Oracle does not support application developers
2004-10-21 09:48:05 psybertramp [Reply | View]
Last time I used OCI was w/ v5. It makes no sense to work in OCI, cuz writing embedded SQL makes so much more sense and is lots faster. just run it thru the pre-compiler & voilá! there's your OCI.
mySQL is fine, but there's so much missing from it that I haven't spent any more time on it, now that Larry has Oracle back on the Macintosh.
BTW, I heard these same comments about 'easier to program', etc. from my DOS buddies back when I started programming the Mac in the mid-80's.
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Why would you bother, with FrontBase available?
2002-11-21 22:12:19 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Why would you bother with either Oracle on Mac OS X, or one of the just-as-obtuse Open Source database solutions on Mac OS X, when FrontBase <http://www.frontbase.com/> is available very inexpensively and with competitive features?
FrontBase has been around since the Mac OS X Server 1.0 days. It's feature-competitive with the Big Name Databases like Oracle and Sybase at a very reasonable price, especially compared to what Macintosh solution providers are used to. (There's even a free low-end deployment license!) It integrates very, very well with WebObjects and with Cocoa and AppleScript Studio application development. It's the only *fully* SQL92-compliant database (that I know of) on the market. It has a great, simple, graphical administration application.
And the download is under *six megabytes*.
What would possess you to want something else, other than some sort of corporate policy or the (deeply mistaken) desire to run Java code within your database?
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PostgreSQL, Sybase as other alternatives
2002-11-20 09:13:38 tpherndon [Reply | View]
You mention MySQL, FrontBase and OpenBase as alternatives to Oracle. It might be useful for your readers to know that PostgreSQL runs just fine on OS X, and that Sybase has rather recently released a full production version of their latest enterprise database.
These two alternatives also fill the market-space that Oracle is targeting, and both are production-ready, rather than "developers' release". Between PostgreSQL and Sybase, there are some differences in what "production-ready" actually means. Sybase has nice GUI tools to manage the database, while PostgreSQL approaches things from a command-line perspective (SQLGrinder can, IIRC, be used, as can phpPgAdmin, if you NEED a GUI). Replication is not yet built-in to PostgreSQL, but there is a sourceforge project (pgreplicator.sourceforge.net) that looks like it addresses this need.
In all, with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase and Oracle addressing various levels of the UNIX-powered database niche, Mac OS X has a lot of database choices available.
10.3 allows the use of the /etc/sysctl.conf file to set the initial kernel parameters at boot time.
It didn't exist on my system, so I created it with the following 2 lines:
kern.maxprocperuid=512
kern.maxproc=2048
After a reboot, I can then launch a bash shell and the user can increase their max allowed processes to 512 or less.
I set this up automatically in the .bashrc script for the user, so that whenever the bash script was launced it ran the following command:
ulimit -u 500
Setting this up has now allowed me to run the Oracle Developer seed on my new G5 without a problem.