Install perl DBD::Oracle module without installing Oracle server onCentOS

I am in the situation of using ora2pg to migrate an Oracle database to postgreSQL. To install ora2pg, DBD::Oracle is required. To install DBD:Oracle, the environmental variable $ORACLE_HOME is required. However, it is not easy to set up an environmental variable for $ORACLE_HOME since I am using a remote dedicated Oracle server. To overcome the problem, I downloaded and installed the following three rpm packages: Please be advised that it should be no problem to set $ORACLE_HOME on a machine which happens to be the Oracle server.

# download link for Linux 64bit
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html
oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1
oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.3.0-1
oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1

I then added the $ORACLE_HOME to ~/.bashrc file.

#By default, the installation path is /usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/
export ORACLE_HOME="/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/"

If you want connect to the Oracle database from command line using sqlplus, you could add $ORACLE_HOME/bin to you PATH, though the syntax for connecting to a remote database using its SID is nasty.

PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/bin
sqlplus AERS/AERS@'(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=remote_server_address)(PORT=1521)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=sid_code)))'

Now, you have done all the steps for running sqlplus on a command line. Will you enjoy the using? You probably not at this moment. Since running sqlplus without further tweaking is a pain in Linux command line: you do not have your history(using upper arrow) or you can not use left/right arrow to edit your sql command. Here is a solution, using rlwrap

# install required repository
wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# install rlwrap if it does not exit in your system
sudo yum install rlwrap
#then run
rlwrap sqlplus ***

You could also add he following alias in your ~/.bashrc file

vim ~/.bashrc
#add the following into the file
alias sqlplus='rlwrap sqlplus'

Install SQL Developer on CentOS 5

1. Configure $JAVA_HOME if there is nothing outputs when you run

echo $JAVA_HOME

Mine is at /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/ so I put the following line into ~/.bashrc file:

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/"

2. Download SQL Developer installation from Oracle SQL Developer RPM for Linux and install.

sudo rpm -ihv sqldeveloper-3.2.20.09.87-1.noarch.rpm

3. add /opt/sqldeveloper to your PATH

PATH=$PATH:/opt/sqldeveloper/

4. Run SQL Developer:

source ~/.bashrc
sqldeveloper

Show Time Stamp on Bash History

Ever wondered when did I execute the command? You could add a time stamp in front of each command you executed.

echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT=" %F %T "' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

You will see time stamps on your commands when you execute history next time.
The result will look like:

1013 2013-05-09 14:47:44 vim scripts_for_Distance_Matrix.txt
1014 2013-05-09 14:48:01 R < scripts_for_Distance_Matrix.txt --no-save