Before You Begin

Before configuring the OCI driver, make sure the following are in place.

• The Oracle database is running and you can access the database using a SQL Plus client. Also ensure that the BPM Engine connects to an Oracle database server. Test the connection by configuring the engine for persistence using the DataDirect driver and verify that the monitoring and recovery database tables have been successfully populated.

• The Oracle client is installed and tnsnames.ora has an entry connecting to the Oracle database. Installing the Oracle client installs all the necessary libraries for database interactions and connection with the OCI driver.

• If you are connecting to an Oracle database server older than version 9.2, obtain a patch from your DBA to update the Oracle client for backward compatibility. Without the appropriate backward compatibility patch, the Oracle client cannot communicate properly with the older database server, and unpredictable behavior might result.

• In order to create connections to an Oracle database using the OCI driver, the OCI client version and the JDBC driver version must match. If the versions are not the same, testing or opening the connection fails. Depending on the version of the OCI client, one of the following errors could occur:

  Character Set Not Supported !!: DBConversion oracle.jdbc.oci8.OCIEnv.envCharSetId java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: oracle.jdbc.oci8.OCIEnv.envCharSetId