title: Oracle InstantClient on Windows link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/oracle-instantclient-on-windows/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 487 created: 2008/07/18 18:27:05 created_gmt: 2008/07/18 18:27:05 comment_status: open post_name: oracle-instantclient-on-windows status: publish post_type: post

Oracle InstantClient on Windows

Just got a new work laptop today, a brand spanking new Lenovo Thinkpad T61. But that’s another story. One of the many pieces of firm nonstandard software I needed to get onto the machine was Oracle’s instantclient. This is a free download from OTN, and for my purposes requires all 5 separate zip files (leaving out the basic “lite” package) and then expanding them onto disk where they need to go (damn! need to get a windows version of command line zip, hate using Explorer for this!). For backward compatibility I got the 32-bit build of version 10.2.0.3 for Windows. In my case that’s C:appsoracleinstantclient_10_2. As on Linux, I gave up trying to separate out the binaries from the libs long ago. The sdk zip creates an instantclient_10_2sdk directory. Once the files are unzipped, you need to modify your PATH to include the base and sdk directories (for me, C:appsoracleinstantclient_10_2;C:appsoracleinstantclient_10_2sdk) and create TNS_ADMIN and NLS_LANG variables (NLS_LANG is required on Windows if you don’t already have some Oracle client software installed that would put it in your registry, don’t let anyone tell you different). Since I keep my tnsnames.ora files in C:appsoracle I defined TNS_ADMIN to use that path. Fir NLS_LANG I used AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 (but you may need to do something if you need anything other than the basic 8859-1 Western character set, some of the other choices include WE8MSWIN1252, UTF8, AL16UTF16, AL32UTF8, but I haven’t tried these on Windows — I think it uses UTF8 on RHEL by default). That’s all there is to it!

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