Herding Bits

It's nice that the author also describes how to install the Oracle instant client for Mac OS X. Personally, I think the people at Oracle should be ashamed for not distributing good installers for all of their client software. The manual process described in this article shouldn't be necessary. Oracle's own download web site describes a process like this, not just for Mac OS X, but in the past I've seen it for the Linux version as well.

The Oracle client for Mac OS X has been years overdue in my opinion. I remember a couple of years in the past, I wanted to install an Oracle OCI client on MOSX so that I could build libraries for Python and PHP, but I couldn't. I could find JDBC drivers that worked fine for Java applications, but nothing native. When Oracle finally did release OCI libraries, they didn't include the *.h files necessary to compile anything against them. When I reported that as a problem, they replied that they would "investigate" it. What's to investigate? We need the *.h files to use the libraries, there are no *.h files in the distribution, therefore you guys screwed up. Just add those include files and lets get on with it already.

So, sadly my experimentation with Oracle on Mac OS X has been on hold for a long time. I have worked on other things in the meantime because I felt it was a waste of time and a frustration trying to get Oracle to work. I knew it would be fixed eventually, but it is disappointing to see that manual installation instructions like this are still necessary.

Cheers to Mr. Salgado and rotten tomatoes to Oracle.