Oracle Connections

Oracle can be more of a beast to work with than other databases. Don't get me wrong; Perl still interfaces with Oracle and does an excellent job-getting everything set up can be a much more involved process though because an Oracle installation is a much greater undertaking than installing a database like MySQL.

Perl still uses the DBI for database access, as well as a DBD driver. To set up the DBD::Oracle driver, however, you need to have the Oracle client software properly installed on the system. This is why the configuration is more painful when using Perl on Oracle databases. Getting the Oracle client software set up is not nearly as easy to do as setting up MySQL or PostGreSQL.

Also, when working with Oracle databases, the user that the program is running under must have the proper Oracle environment variables set, such as the ORACLE_HOME variable. These settings should be available from your Oracle DBA.

Aside from the preceding notes, connecting to and running commands on an Oracle database is the same as working with any other database.