Oracle Http Server For Aix - tested with a phpBB3 forum

Oracle HTTP server is part of the Oracle 11g for AIX distro. Of course you don't need it on the database server. But it's very useful on the application servers needing to access the remote database.
It comes ready for use, with everything necessary including sql*net, sql*plus and php support.
In order to test it on our AIX test system, I decided to install a phpBB 3.04 forum.
Everything worked perfectly withing minutes.
The only things I had to do was
. starting the Oracle installer : ./runInstaller
. Let the installation complete
. browse http:/.......:7777 (yes, it's a strange port, unfortunately my 80 port was already busy) and see Apache works.
. copy my tnsnames.ora remote database definition file (using netca can avoid this step)
. sqlplus in order to test my remote database access and my forum database owner.
. upload and unzip phpBB3 scripts.
. run http://myserver:7777/forum/index.php
This started the phpBB3 install program, which tested that php and oracle were available and started the installation.
For configuring, you only need the tnsname of the remote database and the user/password of the forum schema owner, leave all other fields to default values.
That's all, I was then able to enter my first topics and see remote users connect and answer my posts.
I really appreciated this experience. It showed that, once you are in the "open" world, familiar with some tools like phpBB, you can start a very professional service on a high end AIX server without any intellectual effort, because Oracle people did most of the integration part and provided a ready-to-use tool for system admins as lazy as me.
And the total thing remain very professional because it works on a very reliable high-end Unix Power6 machine, and has the power of Oracle for the database.

 

 

 

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Really great, that it's so easy to use it. I used/use Oracle, but on Windows only, as it's only for my studies, even though I don't like some things about it, but in fact tools like Forms Builder and Reports Builder are fun to play with and create something, I also remember that SQL Plus sometimes gave me a headache, but still I can say Oracle is great.

I just don't get one thing, this suite of Oracle is for UNIX, but I don't understand the part with PHP support, it's already included in the suite or you need to install it separately? what if I already have a LAMP server? or as PHP support you meant that everything works with Oracle database PHP functions? like using OCI8 will work without any problems?

http://php.net/manual/en/book.oci8.php

I never worked with any other database using PHP except MySQL and PostgreSQL and a little of SQLite

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Everything is included, I only had to install the Oracle HTTP server package for AIX on the AIX system, and everything was ready for use, no extra package was needed. When I started the phpBB3 index.php startup, it ran directly, detected that all the oracle plugins were available and the install started immediately.
This install on AIX was surprisingly very simple, and needed far less work than my previous install on a Windows machine, where I had to tune Xampp, removing the bad OCI8 drivers and replacing by the correct ones. For the AIX install I had to touch nothing.

 

 

 

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AIX? Wow, that thing is expensive and it's rarely used by regular people.

Couldn't you also install Oracle on Linux and such?

xboxrulz

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Regular people cannot buy this kind of things. However, a lot of professional people use it when huge databases are involved.
I wanted to show that, even on very expensive systems like AIX machines, it's very easy to install it and use it with phpBB3 on an Oracle database. Even regular people like me are able to do this.

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