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I'm having a difficult time getting the Oracle 12.2.0.1.0-2 ODBC drivers and Instant Client (Basic Lite version) working with homebrew-installed unixODBC 2.3.5 under MacOS 10.12.6 (Sierra).

Extracting both of the Oracle ZIP files to /opt/ora12/instantclient_12_2, creating symlinks for libclntsh.dylib and libclntsh.dylib.12.1, then pointing odcb to the /opt/ora/12/instantclient_12_2/libsqora.lib gives a file not found error. While the path definitely exists and has good permissions, inspecting the dylib with otool -L shows that the @rpath directories are not finding the supporting libraries.

If I pull down the 12.2 sqlplus client, extract it to the same instantclient tree and run the binary, the CLI works fine. This seems to be some sort of dylib loading issue with odbc, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I've tried setting DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH, copying all the libraries straight into /usr/local/lib, all to no effect.

I've not yet tried to pull out install_name_tool and hard coding search paths (getting further in the weeds than I've done before on MacOS) and I'm hoping something so drastic and non-portable isn't required. Is there a step to the install process I'm missing to get this working?

Thanks in advance!

David F. Severski
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1 Answers1

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After significant back and forth on the Oracle Community forums, the condensed solution is documented at this blog post: https://blogs.oracle.com/opal/installing-the-oracle-odbc-driver-on-macos?dd

In brief, the Oracle ODBC supplied odbc_update_ini.sh needs to be ran after first patching to change the reference from libsqora.so.12.1 to libsqora.dylib.12.1. Two libraries (libclntsh.dylib.12.1 and libclntshcore.dylib.12.1) then need to be symlinked into a library location on your PATH (I used /usr/local/lib).

With the above config (using the Basic client instead of Basic Lite, though Basic Lite should work) and the necessary tnsnames.ora black magic (TNS connection strings are covered in many other SO questions), I was able to connect both with command line isql and with my true goal, R's odbc and DBI using unixODBC.

David F. Severski
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  • That looks painful, my condolences. I just went thru this for pymssql https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37771434/mac-pip-install-pymssql-error#51608486 as there was a dependency change that is pending. Thanks for sharing! – JayRizzo Aug 01 '18 at 07:40
  • Even though i can connect via `isql`, I have trouble to find the ODBC connection in the iODBC connector. Do you have any hint on how to achieve that? – Markus Sep 05 '18 at 09:15
  • This is so painful! I'm on 20+ hours trying to get this to work, and I still get the file not found error for `libsqora.dylib.12.1`. Are you able to assist in any way? Where did you put your `tnsnames.ora`? I'm trying to use R's `odbc` and `DBI` as well! Thanks! – talbe009 Aug 30 '21 at 14:06