Installing and Configuring cx_Oracle on CentOS 6

cx_Oracle module of python is used to connect to Oracle from Python. This works only with python 2.7. Here are the steps that can be used to install python2.7 on CentOS 6 and cx_Oracle module.

Installing python 2.7 as alternate python installation on CentOS 6

wget "https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.13/Python-2.7.13.tgz"
tar -zxvf Python-2.7.13.tgz 
cd Python-2.7.13
./configure 
make
make altinstall 
which python2.7 # To verify installation path

Installing Oracle Instant Client

Download Oracle Instant Client from this link. We need instant client and instant client SDK. To install Oracle Instant client just unzip both the zip files to /opt or any other direcory

Create symbolic link libclntsh.so so it points to correct version.

cd /opt/instantclient_11_2/
ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so

Set environment variables

export ORACLE_HOME=/opt/instantclient_11_2
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/instantclient_11_2

Installing pip for python 2.7

pip is a package management system used to install python libraries. Here are the steps to install.

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
python2.7 get-pip.py

Installing cx_Oracle module using pip

pip install cx_Oracle

Sample program to test cx_Oracle

import cx_Oracle

connection = cx_Oracle.connect ("username/password@hostname/service")

cursor = connection.cursor ()
cursor.execute ("SELECT 1 a, 'AA' b, sysdate c FROM dual union select 2 a, 'BB' b, sysdate + 1 c from dual")
result = cursor.fetchall ()

for row in result:
    print row[0], row[1], row[2]

cursor.close ()
connection.close ()