For days, I’ve been working on getting a machine to talk to a new Oracle 10g server and, finally, I’m almost there. I’m using the new Oracle Instant Client, which, instead of installers and CD’s, it’s just a series of zip files. That part is nice.

Oracle says that all you have to do is unzip the files into a directory, add that directory to the PATH and you are done. Naturally, it’s not that easy. This article is a good start on how to get it going.

What I needed to do was to set a whole bunch of environment variables in addition to the PATH. These are all the steps that I did (over the past few days):

• add c:\oracle_client to the PATH
• set SQLPATH to c:\oracle_client
• set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to c:\oracle_client
• set NLS_LANG to AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8MSWIN1252
• Copy your servers tnsnames.ora file to c:\oracle_client and set TNS_ADMIN to c:\oracle_client.
• Edit the c:\oracle_client\tnsnames.ora and in the first line where it says SID= to SID_oracle.server.name=.

To test it, open a new prompt and type the following:

sqlplus user/password@//dbserver:1521/sid

If you to want to use the TNS voodoo (and you probably do), you have to do the following to test it:

sqlplus user/password@SID_oracle.server.name

And you should be able to connect.