02 March 2007

Oracle Instant Client is Instant!

I needed a SQLPlus environment recently to access the RAC DB I have running in a VMWare image.

I'd heard of the Oracle Instant Client, so I checked it out and man, it is dead simple. There's nothing quite like something just working as it is intended to.

To run SQLPlus as a client on Windows:

Download two zip files

* Instant Client Package - Basic Lite

http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/instantclient/instantclient-basiclite-win32-10.2.0.3-20061115.zip

* Instant Client Package - SQL*Plus

http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/instantclient/instantclient-sqlplus-win32-10.2.0.3-20061115.zip

Once downloaded, extract them into the same directory -- which defaults to instantclient_10_2.

Then set PATH to include the directory.

And finally, set TNS_ADMIN to the directory where you have created and saved the tnsnames.ora file. I chucked my tnsnames.ora into the instantclient_10_2 directory so it was all contained.

Then it just works.

Magic!