How to install DBD::Oracle on Mac OS X

Today, I figured out how to get DBD::Oracle to work on Mac OS X Leopard (intel). Since it isn’t (yet) entirely straightforward, I thought I’d describe the process here:

  1. Install instantclient. You will need the basic and sdk modules. I suggest also getting the sqlplus module while you are at it. I put this in /usr/local/instantclient_10_2.

  2. Modify your .bashrc (or whatever) to set ORACLE_HOME and DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH to /usr/local/instanclient_10_2.

  3. Get DBD::Oracle from CPAN. (I got 1.22). Here is where it gets tricky: In Terminal:

% perl Makefile.PL

This generates Makefile.

  1. Edit Makefile, changing: NMEDIT=nmedit to NMEDIT=echo

  2. Edit dbimp.c, removing all code that references dump_env_to_trace(). I found a patch at macosxhints.com, but this is tied to a particular release of DBD::Oracle. I decided to use my mad programming skillz to logically do what was needed. Hopefully this will be fixed in some future version of DBD::Oracle.

  3. Again, in Terminal:

% make && sudo make install

And that should do it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Mac Stuff, Macintoshia. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

6 comments

  1. Josh
    3/26/2009 at 11:34 am

    Thanks a heap mate, this was all the information I needed to kick me in the right direction.

  2. Rob
    8/5/2009 at 9:53 am

    Him, Followed your instructions without success. Did “perl Makefile.PL -l ” first to include the SDK libraries (also tried without -l). Then edited Makefile, “make” runs okay. If I edit dbdimp.c then make fails. I can find three lines with dumpenvto_trace and have commented them out, is this all you meant?

    If I run a test script I get:

    dyld errors for _OCINlsEnvironmentVariabeGet

    Mac OS X 10.5.6
    Oracle 10.2.0
    Perl 5.10.0
    DBD:Oracle 1.23

  3. Rodrigo Arenas
    8/13/2009 at 12:08 am

    Thanks for the tips, some other stuff.. I try on a MBP 2.5 C2D with 10.5.7. I download the last version of the oracle instanclient and i try 64bits… don’t work… work with 32bits version and perl Makefile.PL -l

  4. Raja
    1/27/2010 at 1:59 pm

    Thank you for posting this, it worked, and now I feel like I’m living the dream again.

  5. Sean
    3/1/2010 at 7:47 pm

    I know this is an old thread but just ran into the problem and this workaround worked perfectly. Thanks David.

    @Rob – Don’t comment out the the method definition for dumpenvtotrace().. just comment out the lines where it is called. For me it was only used once on line 456:
    if (DBIS->debug >= 6 || dbd    verbose >= 6 )
    /dump_env_to_trace();/

    Cheers

  6. Charlie Rose
    6/8/2010 at 2:09 pm

    I know this is an old thread but have been having problems. This workaround worked perfectly, thanks. But prior to finding the workaround I tried installing in CPAN sudo -MCPAN -e shell CPAN>install DBD::Oracle. Now I get this error whenever I run sqlplus:
    dyld: Library not loaded: /b/227/rdbms/lib/libodm10.dylib
    Referenced from: /Volumes/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/bin/oracle
    Reason: image not found
    ERROR:
    ORA-12547: TNS:lost contact
    Workaround is to log in with @sid, e.g. sqlplus scott@sid. Anyone seen this? TIA.

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