[R-sig-DB] Problem installing Roracle in RHEL5

[Marc Schwartz]

On Oct 1, 2010, at 6:57 PM, MacQueen, Don wrote:

> I‚m having trouble installing Roracle_0.5-9 in R version 2.11.1 on a RHEL5 machine.
> 
> Here is the error message (full transcript at the end of this email):
> 
> proc CODE=ANSI_C MODE=ORACLE INCLUDE=/usr/lib64/R/include \
>                PARSE=NONE LINES=false PREFETCH=1 RS-Oracle.pc
> proc: error while loading shared libraries: libclntsh.so.11.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
> 
> However, the file libclntsh.so.11.1 is present in $ORACLE_HOME/lib, and is not empty.
> 
> [157]% ls -l $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libclntsh.*
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root           17 Aug 19 14:09 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/lib/libclntsh.so -> libclntsh.so.11.1*
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root           17 Aug 19 14:10 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1 -> libclntsh.so.11.1*
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 oracle oinstall 48724689 Sep 15  2009 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1*
> 
> I had previously succeeded in installing Roracle on this machine; in fact, it‚s still there, but:
>> require(ROracle)
> Loading required package: ROracle
> Error: package 'ROracle' was built before R 2.10.0: please re-install it
> 
> And I recall running $ORACLE_HOME/bin/genclntsh, which is why the required lib file has non-zero size.
> 
> Given the error message, perhaps the ROracle installer is not looking in the right place, but if so I haven‚t succeeded in ensuring it does. I have set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include $ORACLE_HOME/lib.
> 
> Suggestions would be much appreciated. I feel like I‚m forgetting something that I‚ve done before to install ROracle, but can‚t think what it was.
> 
> -Don


Don,

I have never used ROracle so may not be able to offer detailed assistance. From what I can tell, the package has not been updated since late 2007, so presumably the package itself is fairly stable and any installation issues are external to the package itself. That being said, there are Warnings present on CRAN for the package, largely related to the help files, which is not a surprise given the increased depth of checking now present. The change in static to dynamic help files is the primary reason for the error you are getting above related to the package being built prior to R 2.10.0.

If you have not yet, you may wish to review:

  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ROracle/INSTALL

to see if there are any hints there.  

One other thing comes to mind, which is the setting of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Be sure to set that in /etc/ld.so.conf and then run (as root) ldconfig to update the configuration. If you just set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the shell environment (eg. in the bash profile), it may not get picked up by R. I found that to be an issue using RODBC with Oracle when I was on Fedora.

Otherwise, you may wish to contact David James directly to solicit assistance.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz