Steps to upgrade Oracle instant Client for UIM 20.4 CU4 to 19.x from 12.x

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

As part of the UIM 20.4 CU4 patch I need to upgrade my Oracle instant Client to 19.14 or higher.  How can I accomplish this?

 

Resolution

First, depending on your Operating system, obtain the appropriate Instant Client Basic Zip file from Oracle.

You will need at least version 19.14 but higher is fine (as of this writing the most current is 19.16).

Copy this file to some location on your UIM Primary hub and unzip it to a desired folder (e.g. /instantclient_19_16 or C:\oracle\instantclient_19_16 )

If desired, you may now simply copy these files into your existing Oracle Instant Client folder, overwriting existing files in that location.  

However, this may cause confusion as the client version may no longer match the path (e.g. you might have a path called instantclient_12_1 but it contains the instantclient 19 version).

If this is not a concern for you then you can simply unzip the files into the existing directory and move on - no further steps are needed.

If you prefer to leave the old instant client version alone and switch to the new version without overwriting, follow the additional steps below:

First you will need to edit the ($NIMSOFT_HOME)/Nimsoft/robot/robot.cfg on the primary hub.

In the <environment> section you will see the location for the instant client directory.

On Linux/UNIX this will be a variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH while on Windows it is just PATH.

Edit the reference to the old folder (e.g. instantclient_12_1) and change it to point to the path you chose for the new instant client version.

Examples:

Restart the robot after making this change.

You can perform this operation prior to the upgrade or immediately afterward.

 

Additional Information

As mentioned above, in some environments the instant client may be in a non-version-specific folder, e.g.  /opt/instantclient,  C:\OCLIENT\ and so on, or you may not be concerned about matching the client version to the path.

In such cases you can simply drop the new instantclient version files into the same folder, overwriting any that exist with the same filenames, and avoid the need to modify the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

To check what version is currently installed:

You can determine the version of Oracle Instant Client installed on a Linux system by using the ldd command to show the shared library dependencies of the Oracle Instant Client libraries. 

Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where the Oracle Instant Client libraries are installed.

Run the following command to list the shared library dependencies of the Oracle Instant Client libraries:

ldd libclntsh.so

This will show you a list of the shared libraries that the Oracle Instant Client depends on, along with their file paths.

Look for the libocci.so and libclntshcore.so libraries in the list. They will have version numbers in their file names, such as libocci.so.12.1 or libclntshcore.so.12.1. The version numbers indicate the version of Oracle Instant Client that is currently installed.

For example, if you see libocci.so.12.1 and libclntshcore.so.12.1 in the list, this indicates that Oracle Instant Client version 12.1 is installed.