SharePlex 9.2.8 - Installation and Setup for Oracle Source

Perform any required database upgrades.

Perform any required database upgrades before you install SharePlex. This ensures that SharePlex gets the most current object definitions when you run Database setup during the installation and setup steps.

Confirm the database release version.

Verify that the release version of the database is supported by SharePlex.

Consider character sets

When replicating to an Open Target target (non-Oracle target), SharePlex supports replication from any Oracle Unicode character set and the US7ASCII character set. SharePlex posts data to Open Target in the Unicode character set, and therefore if the source data is Unicode or US7ASCII, no conversion on the target is required.

However, if the following are true, conversion is required on the target:

• If the character set of the source data is anything other than Oracle Unicode or US7ASCII, you must install an Oracle client on the target to perform the conversion to Unicode for posting to the target.
• If the data must be posted to the target database in any character set other than Unicode, you must install an Oracle client on the target to perform the conversion and use the target command to identify the target character set for Post to use.
• If you are replicating LOB data, conversion is required regardless of what the source character set is.

To perform conversion with an Oracle client on Linux

1. Install an Oracle Administrator client on the target system. The client must be the Administrator installation type. The Instant Client and Runtime installation types are not supported.
2. Set ORACLE_HOME to the client installation. Set ORACLE_SID to an alias or a non-existing SID. SharePlex does not use them and a database does not have to be running.
3. Install SharePlex using the Linux/Unix installer for your operating system.
4. Make certain the SP_OPX_NLS_CONVERSION parameter is set to the default of 1.

To perform conversion with an Oracle client on Windows

1. Install an Oracle Administrator client on the target system. The client must be the Administrator installation type. The Instant Client and Runtime installation types are not supported.
2. In the SharePlex Registry key \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\QuestSoftware\SharePlex\port_number, set ORACLE_HOME to the Oracle client installation location, and set ORACLE_SID to an alias or a non-existing SID. No Oracle database is required. SharePlex only needs to use the client libraries.
3. Install SharePlex using the Windows installer.
4. Make certain the SP_OPX_NLS_CONVERSION parameter is set to the default of 1.

To apply Unicode and US7ASCII data without conversion

If the source data is Unicode or US7ASCII and you are not replicating LOB data, no conversion or Oracle client is needed. Set the SP_OPX_NLS_CONVERSION parameter to 0 to disable conversion, and then restart Post if it is running.

Consider Case

To support replication between a source of one database type and a target of another type, the letter case of the names of the source and target columns must be the same, for example the column names on both sides in lower case or both sides in upper case. If the case differs between the source and target column names, use the column mapping feature to map the column names in the configuration file.

Install the appropriate ODBC driver.

Verify that the appropriate ODBC driver is installed for your target, and install one if there is not one present.

To test a driver with SharePlex you can use the OTS utility. You can use a standalone version of this utility before you install SharePlex, or you can run the utility from the installation directory after you install SharePlex. See the OTS documentation in the SharePlex Reference Guide for more information.

Enable case sensitivity on key columns

Enable case-sensitivity for the data of any character-based primary key columns or columns that form a unique index. This ensures that Post compares the correct source and target key values so that it updates the correct target row and prevents unique constraint errors. Unless the key values are case sensitive, cases like the following can happen:

Create table Sales (CustName varchar(20) primary key);

insert into Sales values (‘abc company’);

(Succeeds)

insert into Sales values (‘ABC Company’);

(Fails with unique constraint violation error)

Configure a System Data Source Name (Windows installations)

If you are replicating data to a Postgres target on Windows, you must use a DSN (data source name) as the connection method. This DSN must exist before you install SharePlex.

Install on multiple EBS volumes

• Install the database and SharePlex on Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS). An EBS volume is persistent storage, whereas the default Amazon storage is non-persistent and data is lost when the instance shuts down. EBS volumes also provide better performance. Minimum size for a volume is 1GB.
• To optimize disk performance, create multiple EBS volumes and combine them by using software RAID. According to benchmarks, the optimal number of EBS volumes is 8.