JIRA and using the Oracle Call Interface/Thick Driver

[Glenn Edwards]

I'm currently working to migrate our JIRA database from MySQL to Oracle 11g w/RAC. Getting the databases (dev and test) migrated to Oracle has not been an issue, but getting the JIRA app server connected to the new Oracle databases is proving problematic. Since we want to use TAF and some additional features connecting via OCI is required. However, I can't seem to find any documentation on the Atlassian site about this configuration. Is it possible to connect JIRA to an Oracle database using OCI or is only the thin client supported?

Thanks

[Glenn Edwards · Accepted solution]

Actually I figured this one out. To successfully use the Oracle OCI Drivers the ojdbc6.jar file needs to be copied to JIRA's WEB-INF/lib directory. After that is completed several other changes to JIRA's files may be necessary. For my JIRA instance editing the setenv.sh so that tnsnames.ora files can be used was needed. Additionally, a modification to the WEB-INF/classes/entitydefs/filetype-oracle10g file was required so that very-long fields are created as a CLOB. Lastly the dbconfig.xml file needs to be modified for an oracle connection. Two parts of the file that I could tricky are:

<database-type>oracle10g</database-type> Which has to be oracle10g even if you're using an 11g database.

<url>jdbc:oracle:oci:@dbserver:1521/servicename</url> Also oci needs be specified and a "/" used instead of a colon if using service names for your db. Lastly the validation query for Oracle should be <validationquery>select 1 from dual</validationquery>.

However, I'm still unclear why Atlassian recommends against the using the Oracle thick drivers for database connectivity.

[Radu Dumitriu]

I never tried it, but it's just a JDBC driver. Since JDBC means abstraction, you should be able to configure it via OCI

I would suggest to:

1. Install it in the standard way, using ORACLE thin driver
2. shutdown JIRA
3. remove thin oracle driver
4. add OCI oracle driver
5. go on the file system and alter dbconfig.xml (that URL part)

EOS