So December was an interesting month for me, with a few changes in my personal career and the holidays. I take a week off. Which of course lead me spending two weeks catching up on work and to top it off my boss or someone above him decided that we need to take look at a our service architecture. So of course I am now in research mode, which should hopefully lead to some good blog post. Stay tuned.

Here lately it seems that everyone wants to connect to Oracle, but I have to admit this was the first time someone asked me to get PHP to talk to Oracle. It was a lot less painful then I thought it would be, so here is what I did.

A long with the standard PHP RPMs you need to install a couple of additional RPMs from Oracle. These are oracle-instantclient-basic and oracle-instantclient-devel which can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/instant-client/index-100365.html. You will also need php-oci8 RPM which can be download fromhttp://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/files/EL5/.

So after you have downloaded the RPMs go a head and install the packages and create the symlink for libcIntsh.so.

$ rpm -Uvh oracle-instantclient-basic-##.#.#.rpm
$ rpm -Uvh oracle-instantclient-devel-##.#.#.rpm
$ cd /usr/include/oracle/##.#/[client|client64]
$ ln –s libclntsh.so.##.# libclntsh.so

Now you are going to want to setup you environment settings, It is important to set all Oracle environment variables before starting Apache or running a PHP script,  so that the OCI8 process environment is correctly initialized. Setting environment variables in PHP scripts can lead to obvious or non-obvious problems. You can also add Instant Client library path to /etc/ld.so.conf.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/##.#/[client|client64]/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

And now for the big finish. Here is a simple connection script to test it all out.

<?php
$c = oci_connect( ‘USERNAME’,
‘PASSWORD’,
‘SERVERNAME:PORT/SERVICE_NAME’, INSTANCE_NAME’ );

if( $c ) {

$s = oci_parse( $c, ‘SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM all_tables’ );

oci_execute($s) ;

while($res = oci_fetch_array( $s, OCI_ASSOC) ) {

echo $res[‘TABLE_NAME’] . “\n”;
}

}
?>

For a complete list of function and additional install resources check out the following sites:

http://php.net/manual/en/book.oci8.php
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/PHP
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/technote-php-instant-084410.html

With it’s rapid growth in popularity MongoDB is quickly becoming one of the top NoSQL Databases out there and with Python being one of the top ten programming languages according to Tiobe Software’s Programming Community Index. I’ve decided to write a quick how-to to show you just how easy it is to get started with MongoDB and Python.

Assuming that you all ready have Python installed on your system. We’ll start with downloading and installing MongoDB. The first that you will need to do is download the appropriate package from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads to your /tmp directory.

$ curl http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.3.tgz > /tmp/mongo.tgz

Once you have downloaded the correct package, find a suitable directory to unpack it and move it to, such as /opt/mongodb.

$ cd /tmp

$ tar -zxf mongo.tgz

$ sudo mv mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.3 /opt/mongodb

Now you will need to create the data directory. By default, MongoDB stores it’s data in “/data/db”, but if for some reason you need to change the location of the data directory you will need to use the “–dbpath” option when starting the server. However I am sticking with the default directory.

$ sudo mkdir -p /data/db

$ sudo chown -R owerid /data/db

You can start MongoDB with the following command.

$ /opt/mongodb/bin/mongod

Now, test it out by using the MongoDB shell to connect to the server as follows.

$ /opt/mongodb/bin/mongo

MongoDB shell version: 1.6.3

connecting to: test

> db.foo.save( { Message : “Hello World” } )

> db.foo.find()

{ “_id” : ObjectId(“4cdd92bc4f6fb75dd2a7642d”), “Message” : “Hello World” }

>

Once you have verified that MongoDB is working you will need to download the Python driver for it which are called “PyMongo”. If you have the Python “setuptools” installed you should be able to do “easy_install pymongo” to install the drivers. Otherwise you can download the project source from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymongo/ to install the MongoDB drivers.

$ curl http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pymongo/pymongo-1.9.tar.gz  > /tmp/pymongo-1.9.tar.gz

$ tar -zxf pymongo-1.9.tar.gz

$ cd pymongo-1.9/

$ python setup.py install

After everything is installed it’s time to test it all out, so just pop open your favor Python IDE or the Python Console and give it a go. Here is a simple example.

$ python

Python 2.4.3 (#1, Nov 11 2010, 13:34:43)

[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48)] on linux2

Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.

>>> import pymongo

>>> connection = pymongo.Connection( “localhost”, 27017 )

>>> db = connection.test

>>> db.foo.save({ “Message” : “Hello World 2” })

ObjectId(‘4cdd95bfe1382330b5000000′)

>>> for message in db.foo.find():

… print message

…

{u’Message’: u’Hello World’, u’_id’: ObjectId(‘4cdd92bc4f6fb75dd2a7642d’)}

{u’Message’: u’Hello World 2′, u’_id’: ObjectId(‘4cdd95bfe1382330b5000000’)}

>>>

$

For more information on the PyMongo check out the website athttp://api.mongodb.org/python/1.9%2B/index.html.

In the current world of heterogeneous networks it seems that you need to be able to connect to ever type of database system out there. In a recent project, I was asked, to take an existing MySQL and Python system and get it to connect to an existing Oracle Data Warehouse system. To be honest, I hadn’t actually ever connected Python to an Oracle Database before and from experience this would be either very painful or pretty straight forward.

Of course like everything Python it was pretty straight forward. The first thing you will need to get is the correct cx_Oracle module from http://cx-oracle.sourceforge.net/. The cx_Oracle module allows you to connect to Oracle databases and it conforms to the Python database API specification. Which makes life easier for everyone. After you have installed the module the rest is just a matter having the right permission to connect to the Oracle Database and writing the code.

Here is quick script showing you how to connect to Oracle with Python.

#!/usr/bin/python

import cx_Oracle

connstr=’scott/tiger’
conn = cx_Oracle.connect(connstr)
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.arraysize=50
curs.execute(‘select 2+2 “aaa” ,3*3 from dual’)
print curs.description
print curs.fetchone()
conn.close()

For more information check out the Python Programming Language – Official Website