Installing DBD::Oracle under Fedora 11

Recently I got a task which needs to communicate with database Oracle from Perl. Perl has an excellent database abstraction interface DBI. But for specific database it needs a driver – DBD module. To install DBD::Oracle you have to perform following simple steps:

1. Download and install oracle-instantclient11.2-basic and oracle-instantclient11.2-devel RPMs from Instant Client Downloads for Linux x86 page.
2. Export ORACLE_HOME:
   export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client/

3. Install DBD::Oracle using cpan shell or manually.

The most difficult part for me was installing Oracle client. Because navigation on the Oracle web site is not clear. Additionally you can install SQL*Plus package (oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus) to use Oracle shell for testing.

The RedHat Enterprise and CentOS users can use Perl-DBD-Oracle RPM to avoid separate Oracle client installation.