Drupal and Oracle….. Pain

You may or may not realise it, but my “other” site, a pure testing site, www.macgyver.yi.org runs Drupal on an Oracle database.

I’ve done it to actually to learn Oracle, and give me a site I don’t care (so much) about breaking when I am learning.

Well for a good couple of weeks now, I’ve been getting the “There are new releases available for MacGyver.yi.org” email as there has been a new point version released.

OK – good, I like it that I am getting the emails, fantastic, I know that I need to do the work to do the upgrade.

So, today, as part of the bank holiday relaxation, I decided to do that upgrade (update as Drupal defines it, upgrade is from one major version to the next, update is a point release within the same major version)

Great – using this link, there appear to be some nice instructions.

As far as I was concerned, all worked great until step 6.

To quote:-

Run update.php by visiting http://www.example.com/update.php (replace www.example.com with your domain name). This will update the core database tables.

If you are unable to access update.php do the following:

Open settings.php with a text editor.

Find the line that says:

$update_free_access = FALSE;

Change it into:

$update_free_access = TRUE;

Once the upgrade is done, $update_free_access must be reverted to FALSE.

And running the <http://site/update.php> where I came a cropper:-

A PDO database driver is required!

You need to enable the PDO_ORACLE database driver for PHP 5.2.4 or higher so that Drupal 7 can access the database.

See the system requirements page for more information.

Two things here:

1) Version of PHP stated in the error message is wrong (very wrong – not even major revision close)

2) PDO driver for Oracle ? Eh ? Already have Drupal talking to Oracle, from the installation, so what goes ????

Damn, it’s not a simple as I was hoping, and now I was looking at a little bit of a fight to get this working.

Double damn – I had some more plans for today, other than relaxing 😀

Google has some answers, in the form of this link.

I’m going to copy the instructions here – at least then I have a copy of them.

Please note: the patch you will do uses “11.1” as the version number. It will work with version 11.2 and later (but unless you update the patch, you should continue using “11.1” in the ./configure command).

## Download the following instantclient files from Oracle’s website

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html

NOTE – You will need to have an Oracle account, and accept the terms and conditions.

Once downloaded, and copied to your webserver, unzip them.

## Move the files to our install location, /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient

## Fix some poorly named files and add them to our system’s library index:

## Fix more stupid paths:

## Download PDO_OCI

## Patch PDO_OCI since it hasn’t been updated since 2005

# copy the lines below into the file “config.m4.patch”

## Attempt to compile (this is where you’re probably stuck, make sure you’re in your PDO_OCI folder!)

##

If you get an error as follows…

checking for PDO includes… checking for PDO includes…
configure: error: Cannot find php_pdo_driver.h.

Then you may get this fixed by doing…

And you can continue by retrying the configure.

## Add extensions to PHP

# Create /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/pdo_oci.ini

## restart Apache

Congratulations you made it!

## install Drupal!
Read the INSTALL file in the Drupal oracle module. It must be put in a special place in Drupal’s filesystem!

Now, although this all worked for me, in the sense that a phpinfo page returned an “Enabled” for PDO_OCI, but, crucially still failed on the database “upgrade.php” step from Drupal.

Arggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh 😡

Thankfully, Google to the rescue again.

http://drupal.org/node/1029080

So, pulling down the patch (copy/pasting from http://drupal.org/files/1029080-update-database-pdo-rev3_2.patch )

Put this into a file, update.inc.patch

Or pulling down the file directly to the patch file.

Now – here I do something different, I edited the file because the file locations were different in my instance- i.e. my file wasn’t in a/includes, and I was running the patch directly from <drupal_install/includes/>

From:

To:

Now to do the patch

The output of the “diff update.inc.bak update.inc” should match the “update.inc.patch” file.

If it does, everything has gone to plan.

Now re-run <http://site/update.php>; et voila!!! All working.

Wow, what a pain on a Bank Holiday.