• Scott Woodall
  • Software Engineer

Django With An Oracle Backend

Jul 2012

I’m a long time PostgreSQL user and due to business/security requirements am having to use Oracle as a Django backend. This post is a place for me to keep notes when dealing with Oracle. These notes are specific to a Linux environment running Redhat Enterprise 6. The application and database servers are separate hosts.

  1. Must install Oracle Instant Client Package - Basic, Instant Client SDK and Instant Client Package - SQL Plus and setup some environment variables. The SDK package needs to be extracted into $ORACLE_HOME so when building cx_Oracle via pip it can find the Oracle include directory.
> export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64 
	> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
	> export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin

  1. Manually create some directories and files to contain the Oracle connection information

     > mkdir -p $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
 > vi $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora

  2. Create a symbolic link for an Oracle shared library

     > cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib
 > ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so

  3. Cannot use .distinct('field name') in ORM queries, PostgreSQL is the only backend that does support this feature, but you can use .distinct().

  4. South support for Oracle is alpha:

    UserWarning: ! WARNING: South’s Oracle support is still alpha. Be wary of possible bugs. warn(“! WARNING: South’s Oracle support is still alpha. “

  5. Noticeably fewer search results when having to troubleshoot issues.

  6. Oracle will not allow you have to have a table with zero columns. Probably not something to worry about in production, but during development and using South, it becomes a burden.

     > FATAL ERROR - The following SQL query failed: ALTER TABLE "SILLY_TABLE" DROP COLUMN "ID";  The error was: ORA-12983: cannot drop all columns in a table

  7. SQLPLUS is a disaster of a CLI tool. The default formatting of query results is atrocious. I can’t do something crazy like hit the up arrow and run the previous query. While I imagine there are configurations to improve this, I don’t feel like hunting them down. I’ve resulted to SQL Developer for now.