PHP to Oracle 8 Install issues

tjercus

I\'d like to know what setup it takes to connect from one Redhat 7.1 pc with (out of the box) php 4.04 on it to another Redhat 7.1 pc with Oracle 8 on it. phpinfo reports php was compiled without oracle and without OCI8.
Is it necessary to recompile Apache/PHP? and if so, do I need to install Oracle and/or the client libraries (as mentioned in the PHP manual: http://download.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php) on my php machine? (isn\'t it possible to just connect to the Oracle machine (natively, out of the box) like I would with MySQL?) The php manual mentions use of OCI8: \"This extension is more flexible than the standard Oracle extension.\" So this makes me wonder if I actually need the OCI8 libs.
I find the documentation online a bit confusing.

Maybe someone would please like to explain? Thanks very much!

Tjerk

katzkek

You'll need to compile the oracle client on the box with apache and php, and then you'll need to recompile php, and if you have PHP compiled into apache, you'll also need to recompile apache.

From past experience, be pre-warned that oracle and php and apache don't play too nice because you create a monster apache executable (I had a 40 meg one on one experiment, before we gave up and used MySQL) so it may take some experimenting on your part to get a small enough executable... or you could just upgrade your hardware on your web server box to say, an IBM Numa-Q with 8 procs and 4 gigs of RAM... wink grin

tjercus

Thanks for replying!
Through the Oracle tech forum and a from friend, I found out that it is, like you say, necessary to first install the O8 client software on the webserver, before compiling PHP (as Apache module). For Redhat 7.1 I must also install compat_egcs, compat_glibc, compat_libs, cpp and gcc, (for downward compatibility) because some libs on Redhat 7 are too new for Oracle 8.1.7
Hope this is not a problem for O9i, but I don't know when we will be upgrading, so that is not an option yet.
I'll make sure to keep an eye on the size of my PHP install 🙂

tjercus

After two days of getting make-errors, during install of Oracle 8.1.7 Client, I found out there is a patch: glibc-2.1.3-stubs.tar.gz, which you schould unpack and run after occurance of first error. Then return to the install window and click retry. Works fine.