Potentially you may already have tnsnames.ora file installed - or might have one provided for you by a system administrator. Although not so critical in a home environment where you’ll likely only have one or two databases - it’s useful in the corporate world where there are potentially dozens of different systems available to connect to. It contains database names, server names/addresses and port. The tnsnames.ora file specifies connection details for databases in your environment. display of dates and numbers) of your Oracle applications, and should be set to a value appropriate for your region. The last item, the NLS_LANG environmental variable, helps specify the language and behaviour (i.e. If there is, use the more command to display it’s content. Move to your home directory (~) and look to see if there’s an existing. bash_profile file associated with your login. The workaround is to set these variable in the. Prior to OS X 10.10 Yosemite, we would have set environmental variables in the /etc/nf file - however, this method no longer works. The remaining environmental variables will probably be new on your system. The first variable (PATH) probably already exists on your Mac, but will need to be modified to add the new directory path which you created for the Instant Client files. You’ll need the following environment variables configured: Getting Instant Client to function depends on correctly setting up the required environmental variables.These allow the Oracle client to find the files and library routines it needs when required.

Step 2: Defining an ORACLE_HOME and Environmental Variables Create a subfolder named “sdk” inside that folder, and extract instantclient-sdk into it.Library/Oracle/instantclient_11_2), then Extract instantclient-basic and instantclient-plus zip files into single folder (e.g.This is the directory I’ll specify for these instructions going forward (but feel free to use whichever location you think is most appropriate for you).Īfter downloading the three packages above: This has the advantage of the choice above - but is a more Mac-like alternative. optional) software installs in Unix operating systems …but it’s just not commonly used in Mac circles. It’s also good choice as /opt is the base directory favoured for non-standard (i.e. This gives you a separate (clearly specified) directory for your Instant Client files. In Oracle’s installation example, they’ve created a directory:.However, if you have issues defining environmental variables then this may be your only choice. If you upgrade Instant Client in future, copying in the new version’s files over top may result in a mixture of old/new libraries which triggers unexpected behaviour. Copying in non-standard items gets messy when things go wrong - complicating the process to diagnose and fix issues because of the difficulty identifying which items should (and shouldn’t) be there. My concern with this approach is that these are the default locations for OS X libraries and commands. Some install instructions suggest copying the install files into the directories:.In practice you can install the Oracle instant client files anywhere on your file system so long as the PATH environment variable is updated to include that directory in the search path Opinions differ about the best location for installing the downloaded files.

THREE packages are recommended for download. If you’re using an older Mac, here are the instructions to check whether you have a 32 or 64-bit chip. All recent versions of OS X are 64-bit, with support for older 32-bit apps likely to diminish. This should work fine unless you’re using an old (pre-2007) Mac. The only reason that I can think of going for an older version is in the event of a known incompatibility (admittedly, there are none that I know of)

You should always start with the latest version.

However, rather than a single install, you get a choice of library files and versions. This article describes the method that I finally settled on after trying several other variations.ĭownloading the install packages from the Oracle Instant Client download site is the first step.

There are multiple ways to install it, and although most of them work, some are better than others if you want to avoid downstream issues.

However, Oracle’s documentation for installing Instant Client is very light. 24 JanuaryOracle’s Instant Client is a valuable tool allowing anyone on a Mac to connect to Oracle databases, and is a prerequisite for installing SQL Developer, SQLPlus, or OCI8 (for PHP connectivity).

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