Setting up DBI and DBD::Oracle on Solaris

Login to sol.students.engr.scu.edu
Execute the commands . /etc/profile && setup oracle
Create a directory where the modules will be placed (such as: mkdir ~/perl).
First we need to install the DBI module. To do so we need to use the CPAN architecture. At first execute the command /usr/local/bin/perl -MCPAN -e shell LIB=~/perl PREFIX=~/perl You will be asked several questions, related to setting up the CPAN build environment. Make sure to specify PREFIX="~/perl" when prompted to do so (a question will be asked about options that are to be passed, and one of them will have a sample PREFIX= variable).
Once CPAN setup is complete, issue the command: install DBI in the CPAN shell.
Once DBI is compiled and setup, we will need to install DBD::Oracle, a library that is used in conjunction with DBI to access the Oracle RDBMS from perl.
Exit the CPAN shell by either Pressing Ctrl-D or typing exit
Make sure that "setup oracle" has been executed. Now we will need to set the proper environment variable so that the newly installed DBI module can be seen:export \ PERL5LIB="/home/username/perl/lib/site_perl/5.8.2/sun4-solaris/" where username, of course is your own username.
Again invoke the CPAN shell as specified earlier in the document.
In the CPAN shell, issue the command: install DBD::Oracle
DBD::Oracle will be compiled and installed. Ignore any warnings generated.
Exit the CPAN shell, and you should be able to use DBI and DBD::Oracle

Using DBI and DBD::Oracle

Make sure to only use the /usr/local/bin/perl interpreter on Solaris machines. To allow the interpreter to see the newly installed libraries, add these statements right after the #!/usr/local/bin/perl line to your Perl scripts:

use lib qw(/home/username/perl/lib/site_perl/5.8.2/sun4-solaris);
use lib qw(/home/username/perl/lib/sun4-solaris/);

use DBI;
use DBD::Oracle;

Where again, username is your own useraname.

To connect to the database, use these statements:

my ($db_username) = "username";
my ($db_password) = "password";
my ($db_host) = "server9.engr.scu.edu";
my ($db_sid) = "dc81";

        $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:host=$db_host;sid=$db_sid",
			$db_username, $db_password,
			{RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 1});

(Leave db_host and db_sid as is, but make sure to change db_username and db_password to reflect the settings for your own Oracle account). Use of DBI itself is beyond the scope of this document, but documentation should be readily available at google. O'Reilly Publishing's Perl Cookbook also contains several excellent DBI examples.

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