Re: [gnome-db] Oracle 9 support

[Steve Fosdick <gnomedb pelvoux demon co uk>]

On 18 Feb 2003 15:13:16 +0100
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> wrote:

> what we need are 2 things:
> 
> * a way to detect the oracle version installed in our configure script

As I said in my reply to Thomas, the .a libraries have the version
number in the library name.  We can use this to our advantage by looking
for a library known to be in common between version 8 and 9 and see
which number it has in the filename.

I did a quick look round and found that there are many libraries common
to both versions.  Of that list libclient and libcore look like they
might be good candidates.

So, we look in $ORACLE_HOME/lib and if we find libclient8.a we use the
version 8 library list and if we find libclient9.a we use the version 9
list.

> * a list of oracle9 needed libraries, so that, depending on the
> version detected, it will use one or the other set.

I will need to experiment with this.  At the moment I only have
Oracle 8i (8.1.7 and 8.1.6) and 9i (9.2.0) for testing so if anyone has
8.0 or 9.0 or 9.1 installed it may be useful to double check with those.

The other possibility is to use the shared oracle client library instead
of the archive libraries we currently use.  This is simplly called
libclntsh.so on both 8i and 9i and is also found in $ORACLE_HOME/lib

Is there are reason why we don't use the shared library?

Steve.