$Id: README,v 1.5 2004/04/20 18:05:25 jeff Exp $ extproc_perl enables Oracle stored procedures and functions to be written in Perl. It uses Oracle's external procedure interface to create Perl interpreters on the fly to execute Perl subroutines. These interpreters are persistent throughout the life of the database session. Please send all bug reports, questions and suggestions to jeff@smashing.org. More information can be found at http://www.smashing.org/extproc_perl REQUIREMENTS ------------ o A version of Solaris or Linux supported by Oracle o Perl 5.6.1 or later o shared libperl, threading disabled (threading perl crashes extproc_perl) o Oracle 8i (8.1.7 or later) or 9i server with OCI development libraries and headers (problems have been reported with versions earlier than 8.1.7) o DBI and DBD::Oracle 1.15 DOCUMENTATION ------------- There is a comprehensive user's guide available on the web at http://www.smashing.org/extproc_perl/userguide.html. This is the official documentation for extproc_perl. TESTING ------- WARNING: The test suite is very immature. Failures DO NOT indicate that extproc_perl will not run on your system, but you should feel free to report them. Before you run 'make test', you need to do several things to set up your environment, some of which you may be familiar with from DBD::Oracle: * Set the ORACLE_SID environment variable to the name of your database. * Set the ORACLE_USERID environment variable with your username and password separated by a slash (e.g. user1/foobar). * If you are using Oracle 9.2.0 or higher, add the following line to the SID_DESC section of your external procedure listener configuration: (ENVS="EXTPROC_DLLS=/path/to/your/build/directory/extproc_perl_test.so") Replace /path/to/your/build/directory with the absolute path to the directory containing the extproc_perl source code. You configuration should look something like this: (SID_DESC = (SID_NAME = PLSExtProc) (ORACLE_HOME = /u01/app/oracle/product/9.2.0) (PROGRAM = extproc32) (ENVS="EXTPROC_DLLS=/home/jeff/build/extproc_perl2/extproc_perl_test.so") ) Reload the listener with 'lsnrctl reload' and you should be ready to test. IMPORTANT!!! Remove this configuration once you're finished testing. The test version of extproc_perl enables some testing features that are not suitable for production use.