Data Science & Machine Learning

Hi all,

We are in the process of installing the new ORE 1.5 client packages in a Linux server. Following the documentation, we have successfully installed Oracle DB Instant Client v. 12.1 in the directory /usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64/lib.

Problem is, ORE fails to load, in fact due to ROracle failure:

Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) :

  unable to load shared object '/usr/lib64/R/library/ROracle/libs/ROracle.so':

  libclntsh.so.11.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Error: package ‘OREdm’ could not be loaded

It's true that the file libclntsh.so.11.1 does not exist, simply because the client installed is 12.1, and not 11.1:

[ctsats@dev-hd-01 ~]$ cd /usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64/lib

[ctsats@dev-hd-01 lib]$ ll

total 190276

-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root   6990875 Jul  7  2014 libclntshcore.so.12.1

-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  58793741 Jul  7  2014 libclntsh.so.12.1

[...]

Checking the respective situation in the latest Oracle Big Data Lite VM 4.3.0.1 (which includes ORE 1.5), I saw that there are several soft/symbolic links, eventually all pointing to the 12.1 client:

[oracle@bigdatalite ~]$ cd /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/lib

[oracle@bigdatalite lib]$ ll

total 1717944

[...]

-rwxr-xr-x. 1 oracle oinstall    6994203 2015-12-23 21:49 libclntshcore.so.12.1

-rwxr-xr-x. 1 oracle oinstall  59492708 2015-12-23 21:49 libclntsh.so.12.1

[...]

Inspired from that, we created a new soft link  libclntsh.so.11.1 -> libclntsh.so.12.1, which resolved the issue.

It seems that ROracle, despite being up to date (version 1.2-1), looks only for the 11.1 client...

My question is: is this behavior expected (after all, what we did feels like a workaround)? If no, what have we missed in the installation procedure?

Many thanks in advance