1. Introduction
  2. Compilation, Installation & Configuration
  3. Notes

Introduction

Why Oracle?

Oracle8 is a powerful, tunable, scalable and reliable industrial RDBMS. It provides some functionalities which are absent in simple freeware RDBMS like MySQL and PostgresSQL, such as: transactions support, concurrency and consistency, data integrity, partitioning, replication, cost-based and rule-based optimizers, parralel execution, redo logs, RAW devices and many other features. Although Oracle is a very functional database, the additional qualities like reliability impose some overhead. In fact, providing many advantages Oracle has some disadvantages. For example great tunability requres more experienced DBA, redo logs support provide great reliability against instance and media failures but requires more efficient disk system. I think you should select Oracle as a database for UdmSearch if you want to search through hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes of information, reliability is one of the primary concerns, need high avalability of the database, and you are ready to pay higher sums for hardware and Oracle DBA to achive better quality of service.

Udmsearch+Oracle8 Installation Requirements

In order to install Udmsearch with Oracle RDBMS support you must ensure the following requirements.

Currently supported/tested platforms

Oracle versions: Operation systems: Oracle Server may be ran on any platform supporting tcp/ip connections. I see no difficulties to port UdmSearch Oracle driver to any commerical and freeware unix systems, any contribution is appreciated.

Compilation, Installation & Configuration

Compilation

Oracle 8.0.5.X and Linux RedHat 6.1 

  ./Configure --with-oracle8=oracle_home_dir
  make
  make install

If you have any troubles, try to put 'CC = i386-glibc20-linux-gcc' in the src/Makefile, this is old version of gcc compiler for glibc 2.0.

Installation & Configuration

Check whether Oracle Server and Oracle Client work properly.

First, try udmsearch service is accessible 

 [oracle@ant oracle]$ tnsping udmsearch 3

TNS Ping Utility for Linux: Version 8.0.5.0.0 - Production on 29-FEB-00 09:46:12
(c) Copyright 1997 Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Attempting to contact (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(Host=ant.gpovz.ru)(Port=1521))
OK (10 msec)
OK (0 msec)
OK (10 msec)

Second, try to connect to Oracle Server with svrmgrl and check whether UdmSearch tables were created: 

[oracle@ant oracle]$ svrmgrl command='connect scott/tiger@udmsearch'

Oracle Server Manager Release 3.0.5.0.0 - Production

(c) Copyright 1997, Oracle Corporation.  All Rights Reserved.

Oracle8 Release 8.0.5.1.0 - Production
PL/SQL Release 8.0.5.1.0 - Production

Connected.
SVRMGR> SELECT table_name FROM user_tables;
TABLE_NAME
------------------------------
DICT
DICT10
DICT11
DICT12
DICT16
DICT2
DICT3
DICT32
DICT4
DICT5
DICT6
DICT7
DICT8
DICT9
PERFTEST
ROBOTS
STOPWORD
TAB1
URL
19 rows selected.

Check the library paths in /etc/ld.so.conf

[oracle@ant oracle]$ cat /etc/ld.so.conf
/usr/X11R6/lib
/usr/lib
/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib
/usr/lib/qt-2.0.1/lib
/usr/lib/qt-1.44/lib
/oracle8/app/oracle/product/8.0.5/lib
This file should contain line oracle_home_path/lib to ensure UdmSearch will be able to open libclntsh.so, the shared Oracle Client library.

Correct the indexer.conf file

You should specify DBName, DBUser, DBPass in order that UdmSearch can connect to Oracle Server. DBName is the service name, it should have the same name that was writen to 'tnsnames.ora' file, DBUSer and DBPass are Oracle user and his password correspondingly. You can run indexer now.

Setting up search.cgi

Copy the file /usr/local/udmsearch/bin/search.cgi to apache_root/cgi-bin/search.cgi. Then add two lines to apache's http.conf file: 
SetEnv ORACLE_HOME /oracle8/app/oracle/product/8.0.5
PassEnv ORACLE_HOME
Correct the search.htm to provide DBName, DBUser, DBPass information. search.cgi should work now.

Notes

Notes to UdmSearch 3.0.7

Oracle native support is beta. It seems to work well, although is not very fast and efficient. I do not recommend to use it unless you really like to test UdmSearch with Oracle8 DBMS. I plan to improve Oracle support to make it one of the primary choices for UdmSearch search engine.

Anton Zemlyanov, az@hotmail.ru