Re: Talking to Oracle from Linux?

In article <323F71EE.D36_at_avalon.net>, Ken Parker <kep_at_avalon.net> wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Anyone know of an easy way (or any way for that matter...) to get an app
>to talk to Oracle from Linux? We have a data acquisiton device that
>*must* exist on linux (that's where the drivers exist) and would like to
>dump the info into an Oracle Database. Currently, we can e-mail the
>file as an attachment and have a c++ program running on the database
>server (solaris) pick the mail message apart but this is ugly as h*ll.

The SCO version of Oracle does run under Linux using the iBCS emulator, although it's not supported. I've got the 90-day demo version mostly working, although I'm still having some trouble getting PL/SQL working at the moment.

Another way, which doesn't involve running any Oracle stuff on Linux directly, is to just communicate using standard TCP/IP to a process on another box running an Oracle server which then communicates with the database. One way to do this which has worked very well for me is to use Tcl with the Tcl-Dp and Oratcl extensions. You use the basic Tcl stuff and Tcl-Dp on both ends, and Oratcl on the Oracle server box. Tcl-Dp makes it just about trivial to call a function in another Tcl-Dp process across the network, and Oratcl makes it just about trivial to talk to an Oracle server. You don't have to know anything about TCP/IP and you don't really even have to know anything about Oracle (I certainly didn't when I first got it working). The program running on the Linux box just calls functions from a program running on the Oracle server box (exactly like it would call a local function), and since the program running on the Oracle server box has the Oratcl extension, it can easily access the Oracle database and pass results back.

--
Steve Kanefsky