Strawberry Perl, DBD::Oracle module and Oracle Instant Client 12.2

I’ve been quiet for a long time, but now I ran into something I thought might be worth writing.

Recently I had to update 64-bit Strawberry Perl with newest DBD::Oracle module and newest Oracle Instant Client 12.2. The process is actually quite simple, but compiling and running the DBD::Oracle has some prerequisites which took me some time to understand. So to ease someone else’s pain..

Download and unpack Oracle 64-bit Instant client packages to one directory, e.g. C:\oracle_ic_12.2. The required client packages are:

Basic

Sqlplus

SDK

Keep the stuff in directories present in the archives. Add the ic path to your path environment variable. Also add ORACLE_HOME variable and point it to the same ic directory.

These are enough to satisfy DBD::Oracle make process with cpan:

cpan -m DBD::Oracle

The actual usage on Windows requires you to install Visual Studio runtime 2013, x64-version. You can find it probably in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads

You can easily test the DBD::Oracle connection with the following script:

use DBI;

$dbh=DBI->connect(“dbi:Oracle://youroracleserver:1521/service.name”,”scott”,”tiger”);

If it complains about wrong username or password, it established the connection successfully. If it logs in successfully, you might want to remove the sample schemas.. 🙂