Installing Oracle SQL*Plus on CentOS 4

The following guide will show you how we installed Oracle SQL*Plus on CentOS release 6.7 (Final).

First of all we need to download the appropriate files from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html.

To access the files you need to click the Accept License Agreement radio button which means you agree to the ‘OTN Development and Distribution License Agreement for Instant Client‘ and finally you need to be logged in.

To login visit this page https://login.oracle.com/mysso/signon.jsp. If you are not registered yet, you need to create an account with a valid email from here https://profile.oracle.com/myprofile/account/create-account.jspx.

Once you are done with these steps, you need to download two rpm files for the client:

• oracle-instantclientRELEASE-basic-VERSION.x86_64.rpm
• oracle-instantclientRELEASE-sqlplus-VERSION.x86_64.rpm

The latest version at the time this document was written was version 12.1.0.2.0 and so we downloaded the following files:

• oracle-instantclient12.1-basic-12.1.0.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm
• oracle-instantclient12.1-sqlplus-12.1.0.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm

The files were then moved to the server that was to be installed and using an account with administration rights, they were installed using the the rpm -ivh  command:

rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient12.1-basic-12.1.0.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient12.1-sqlplus-12.1.0.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm

In case you placed the two rpm files in a folder by themselves you can install both at the same time using the following command which is version independent:

rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient*.rpm

The packages will be installed in /usr/lib/oracle/RELEASE. Use ls /usr/lib/oracle/ to find the RELEASE number of your installation (in case you are not sure) and copy the path to client64 folder. In our case it was /usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64. We will use this path as the ORACLE_HOME variable later on.

Following, you need to setup the environment variables for bash.
If you want to set the environment variables in your account only, add the following in your ~/.bash_profile:

ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64
PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export ORACLE_HOME
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH

And execute source ~/.bash_profile  to reload your .bash_profile (alternatively, logout and login again).

If you want to set the environment variables for all users, create a .sh file in /etc/profile.d/ (e.g. oracle.sh) and add the content above in that file.

SQL*Plus will be available for use using the sqlplus command.

sqlplus "username/password@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=HOSTNAME_OR_IP)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=MY_SID)))"

The following example will connect to server with

• IP 192.168.10.1,
• on the SID ASID
• using the user myuser
• and the password pass

sqlplus "myuser/pass@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.168.10.1)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=ASID)))"

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