This chapter describes the process of installing Personal Oracle for both Windows 95 and Windows 3.11. You'll be able to follow the examples in this book more easily if you install and use the appropriate trial version of Personal Oracle on your PC.
The CD-ROM accompanying this book contains, among other things, a 90-day trial license for Personal Oracle. You can install Personal Oracle directly from the CD, or you can download the latest version of Personal Oracle from Oracle Corporation's World Wide Web page at http://www.oracle.com.
The material in this book is based on version 7.2.2 of Personal Oracle7 for Windows 95. Before you proceed with the installation, verify that you have the necessary hardware and software.
To install and use Personal Oracle7 for Windows 95, you need the following configuration:
Before you begin the installation process, you'll want to exit any open applications. To begin the actual installation, execute the Oracle installer by running SETUP.EXE, which can be found in \po7_win95\win95\install.
The Installer prompts you for the location you want to use for the Oracle home directory. (See Figure 2.1.) By default, the Oracle Installer chooses to install all Oracle7 products into the c:\orawin95 directory. You can select another drive or directory if disk space on your C drive is a concern.
Figure 2.1.Choosing a directory for Oracle Home for installation in Windows 95.
The Oracle Installer gives you three choices for your Personal Oracle installation: Application Developer (Complete), Runtime (Database Only), and Custom. (See Figure 2.2.) Unless you are short on disk space, select the Application Developer installation option.
Figure 2.2. Oracle installation options.
During the installation of Personal Oracle, the Oracle Installer displays a progress bar.
The Oracle Installer scans the directories in your DOS path to determine if other copies of certain dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that Personal Oracle uses are present. If the Installer finds another copy of any of these DLLs, it displays a message informing you of the situation. You have three choices:
The Installer's last task is the installation of a starter Personal Oracle database. When the starter database has been installed, the Installer displays a message indicating that the installation is complete. (See Figure 2.3.)
Figure 2.3.Personal Oracle installation is complete.
The Installer will create two program groups: Oracle for Windows 95 and Personal Oracle7 for Windows 95. The Oracle for Windows 95 program group contains six items, as shown in Figure 2.4:
Figure 2.4. The Oracle for Windows 95 program group.
Seven objects are installed in the Personal Oracle7 for Windows 95 program group, as shown in Figure 2.5:
Figure 2.5. The Personal Oracle7 for Windows 95 program group.
The following installation procedure is based on version 7.1.4 of Personal Oracle7 for Windows 3.11. Before you proceed with the installation, verify that you have the necessary hardware and software.
To install and use Personal Oracle, your computer configuration should consist of the following:
Since January 1995, Oracle Corporation has made available a trial version of Personal Oracle on its World Wide Web page. The June 1995 version was distributed as a self-extracting EXE file named PO7SEWIN.EXE and was 18,597,394 bytes in size. This file also includes a trial version of Oracle Objects for OLE.
Obviously, downloading PO7SEWIN.EXEU can take quite a while. The time required to download the file depends on the speed of your Internet connection and the demand on the Oracle Web server.
After you've downloaded the file, place it in its own directory--;I suggest c:\po7. Either exit Windows or use an MS-DOS prompt and execute the following DOS command:
c:\po7\po7sewin.exe -d -n
All of the files are extracted into three top-level directories:
c:\po7\gc25ptch c:\po7\po7_win c:\po7\win32s
If you're downloading Personal Oracle from the Oracle WWW page, you really need a total of 133MB of free disk space to perform a complete install of Personal Oracle.
Once you've installed Personal Oracle, you can free up the 64MB of disk space consumed by the po7_win, gc25ptch, and win32s directories. You might want to save PO7SEWIN.EXE in case you decide to reinstall Personal Oracle from scratch.
Personal Oracle requires the installation of version 1.20 of Win32s--;Microsoft's 32-bit API extension for Windows. Before you begin the Personal Oracle installation, install Win32s by executing c:\po7\win32\disk1\setup.exe. You can verify that Win32s has been properly installed by running Freecell.
Before you begin the installation of Personal Oracle, you should exit any open applications so that you have enough free memory to start the default Personal Oracle database.
To begin the actual installation, you'll want to execute the Oracle installer by executing ORAINST.EXE, which you can find in \po7_win\install as shown in Figure 2.6. Figure 2.6. Running ORAINST.EXE. The Installer prompts you for the location to be used for the Oracle home directory. (See Figure 2.7.) By default, the Oracle Installer chooses to install all Oracle7 products into the c:\orawin directory. You can select a different drive or directory if disk space on your C drive is a concern. Figure 2.7. Choosing a directory for Oracle Home for installation in Windows 3.11. The Oracle Installer gives you three choices for your Personal Oracle installation: Complete, Minimal, and Custom. (See Figure 2.8.) Unless you are short on disk space, use the Complete installation option. Figure 2.8. Oracle installation options. During the installation of Personal Oracle, the Oracle Installer displays a progress bar.
The Oracle Installer scans the directories in your DOS path to determine if other copies of certain dynamic link libraries that Personal Oracle uses are present. If the Installer finds another copy of a DLL, it displays a message informing you of the conflict. (See Figure 2.9.) You have three choices:
Figure 2.9. Message regarding DLL conflicts. Figure 2.10. Installer message: File describes extra DLLs. The last task performed by the Installer is the installation of a starter Personal Oracle database. When the starter database has been installed, the Installer displays a message indicating that the installation is complete. (See Figure 2.11.) Figure 2.11. Personal Oracle installation is complete. Finally, the Installer posts a message informing you that the default password for the Personal Oracle database is oracle and that you can change it with the Password Manager utility. (See Figure 2.12.) Figure 2.12. Installer message regarding default database password.
The installation of Personal Oracle changes the contents of the Windows desktop. The Personal Oracle Installer creates the following Windows program groups:
I describe the contents of these Windows program groups in the next four subsections.
The Personal Oracle7 Windows program group contains the Oracle Database Administration Tools. (See Figure 2.13.) If you've used the Oracle RDBMS in the past, you'll find that using some of these tools is much more intuitive than using SQL*DBA or SQL*Plus to accomplish the same task. In some cases the new tool might be easier to use because it has only a subset of the capabilities that exist in SQL*DBA or SQL*Plus. The Personal Oracle7 Windows program group contains the following items:
Database Manager
User Manager
Session Manager
Database Expander
Object Manager
SQL*DBA
SQL*Loader
Import
Export
Backup Manager
Recovery Manager
Password Manager
Online help for the Database Tools
Online Oracle7 documentation
Figure 2.13.
The Personal Oracle7 Windows program group. Adding SQL*Plus to this program
group is convenient because then you don't have to open the Oracle program group
when you want to use the program. To add SQL*Plus as an item in the Personal Oracle7
program group, select New from the Windows menu, choose Program Item, and click OK.
Use Browse to select \bin\plus31.exe under the Oracle home directory.
The Oracle Windows program group consists of the following items, as shown in Figure 2.14:
Figure 2.14. The Oracle Windows program group. If you add SQL*Plus to the Personal Oracle7 program group, you will rarely need to use the items in the Oracle program group.
The Oracle7 ODBC Windows program group contains the following items, as shown in Figure 2.15:
Figure 2.15. The Oracle7 ODBC Windows program group. After you've created an ODBC data source for Personal Oracle, you probably won't use the items in this program group very often.
The Oracle Objects for OLE Windows program group consists of the following items, as shown in Figure 2.16:
Figure 2.16. The Oracle Objects for OLE Windows program group. Remember that Personal Oracle and Oracle Objects for OLE are separate products. Personal Oracle doesn't depend on the installation of Oracle Objects for OLE. If you aren't planning to use Oracle Objects for OLE, you can delete this program group.
The Oracle Installer automatically modifies the Windows initialization file, WIN.INI, by adding a section for Oracle.
[Oracle] ORA_CONFIG=C:\WINDOWS\ORACLE.INI
The Installer creates the ORACLE.INI file in the \windows directory. The Installer uses the location that you specified for the Oracle home directory to write the following lines to ORACLE.INI:
[Oracle] ORACLE_HOME=C:\ORAWIN NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 ORAINST=C:\ORAWIN\dbs RDBMS71=C:\ORAWIN\RDBMS71 PRO16=C:\ORAWIN\pro16 SQLPATH=C:\ORAWIN\DBS PLUS31=C:\ORAWIN\PLUS31 EXECUTE_SQL=PLUS31 MSHELP=C:\ORAWIN\mshelp TOOLS_GROUP=Personal Oracle7 HELP_GROUP=Personal Oracle7 RDBMS70=C:\ORAWIN\rdbms70 PRO15=C:\ORAWIN\pro15 PRO14=C:\ORAWIN\pro14 RDBMS71_PORACLE=C:\ORAWIN\RDBMS71 RDBMS71_CONTROL=C:\ORAWIN\DBS RDBMS71_ARCHIVE=C:\ORAWIN\RDBMS71\ARCHIVE VS10=C:\ORAWIN\VS10 LOCAL=2: SQLNET DBNAME oracle7=2: PLSQL21=C:\ORAWIN\PLSQL21
In addition, the Installer makes a copy of AUTOEXEC.BAT and places c:\orawin\bin (or the bin directory beneath your Oracle home directory) at the front of the DOS path.
Personal Oracle ships with an Oracle7 open database connectivity (ODBC) driver that many third-party application development environments--;such as PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, and Visual Basic--;use to communicate with a Personal Oracle database. Of course, PowerBuilder and SQLWindows can use native drivers to communicate with Personal Oracle.
To access Personal Oracle via ODBC, define the Personal Oracle database as an ODBC data source with the following procedure. In the Oracle7 ODBC program group, double-click the ODBC Administrator icon. (See Figure 2.17.) Figure 2.17. The ODBC Administrator. When you invoke the ODBC Administrator, it displays the Data Sources window. (See Figure 2.18.) Click Add to add a new data source. Figure 2.18. The Data Sources window. The ODBC Administrator displays a list of the available ODBC drivers that you can use to create a new data source. Select the driver named Oracle71 and click OK. (See Figure 2.19.) Figure 2.19. The Add Data Source window. You can specify the contents of the following three fields in the Oracle7 ODBC Setup window. (See Figure 2.20.)
Figure 2.20. The Oracle7 ODBC Setup window. When you click OK, the ODBC Administrator records the details for the new data source, which now appears in the list of ODBC data sources. (See Figure 2.21.) You are now able to connect to Personal Oracle through the ODBC driver by specifying the ODBC data source name you have assigned to the Personal Oracle database.
Figure 2.21. The Data Sources window with the new Personal Oracle data source.
The two most common installation problems are
If you don't have enough memory to start the Personal Oracle database, the Database Manager displays Oracle error ORA-09368. This error can occur under the following conditions:
One known problem for Personal Oracle is Microsoft Sound System 2.0. Specifically, a driver named SNDEVNTS.DRV isn't compatible with Win32s and, as a result, can cause Personal Oracle to crash. If you must use Personal Oracle, be sure that this driver isn't loaded in your CONFIG.SYS or SYSTEM.INI. Microsoft has a patch for the driver named SEVNT022.EXE, which you can obtain from a variety of sources including the Microsoft FTP server (ftp.microsoft.com) or WWW site (www.microsoft.com).
This chapter covers two major topics:
