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Preparing an Oracle test setup
This document is work in progress
This document attempt to ease the task of running the Django (or your own app's) test suite against Oracle by:
- Providing a step by step setup guide to achieve that.
- Hopefully collecting information (best practices, tuning tips) to do that as efficiently as possible.
Chosen components are:
- Oracle XE (10g)
- GNU/Debian Linux x86. Things should also work with Ubuntu Linux without too much tweaking.
The system isn't going to be dedicated exclusively to run Oracle so we will leave things set up so it is necessary to start it manually before a test-debug session.
Obtain and install Oracle XE
We will be roughly following the Oracle installation documentation.
Download the oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb package file from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/express-edition/downloads/index.html (Oracle Database 10g Express Edition for Linux x86). You need to have an Oracle Developer Network account and to accept the licence agreement.
Contrarily to what is suggested in some places I've found the newer oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb package you can get here (as of Nov 2010) and installable by using high level Debian/Ubuntu package management tools (APT, Aptitude, ...) didn't install things like the /etc/init.d/oracle-xe init script and some files under the /usr/lib/oracle hierarchy so I went with the older package plus the low-level dpkg package manager and taking care of dependencies manually (see next step).
Install the prerequisite packages, if you fail to do so the installation won't be successful but won't abort either:
$ sudo apt-get install bc libaio1
Make sure you have enough swap space. If you fail to do this, the Oracle package installation will abort with an error message about this unmet condition.
RAM [MiB] Swap size required 0 > RAM >= 256 3 * RAM 256 > RAM > 512 2 * RAM RAM >= 512 1 GiB Install the package you downloaded:
$ sudo dpkg -i oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb
Configure the DB engine:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
It will ask you a number of questions, namely:
- A TCP port for the Oracle Database XE graphical user interface (default: 8080)
- A TCP port for the Oracle database listener (default: 1521)
- A password for the SYS and SYSTEM administrative user accounts. Take note of the value you choose.
- Whether you want the database to start automatically when the computer starts -- I chose NO here, see next step.
Optional -- Create an alternate init script -- If you've answered NO to the question about running the Oracle DB engine automatically on system start then it won't be possible to start it manually because that flag is stored (among others) in the /etc/default/oracle-xe configuration file and we would be using the same script as the one executed when the system boots (the SyV /etc/init.d/oracle-xe script) that always examines these values.
What we can do is to create a slightly modified /etc/init.d/xe script that ignores that flag and allows us to control the Oracle process at will:
$ cd /etc/init.d $ sudo cp -a oracle-xe xe $ sudo patch < /home/myuser/oracle-xe-script.diff
This is the oracle-xe-script.diff patch file (you can also download it):
--- xe 2006-02-24 17:23:15.000000000 -0300 +++ xe.new 2010-11-03 07:58:43.000000000 -0300 @@ -596,13 +596,8 @@ # See how we were called case "$1" in start) - if test -f "$CONFIGURATION" + if test ! -f "$CONFIGURATION" then - if test "$ORACLE_DBENABLED" != "true" - then - exit 0 - fi - else echo "Oracle Database 10g Express Edition is not configured. You must run '/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure' as the root user to configure the database." exit 0 @@ -613,13 +608,8 @@ configure ;; stop) - if test -f "$CONFIGURATION" + if test ! -f "$CONFIGURATION" then - if test "$ORACLE_DBENABLED" != "true" - then - exit 0 - fi - else echo "Oracle Database 10g Express Edition is not configured. You must run '/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure' as the root user to configure the database." exit 0Now we can start/stop Oracle manually using it:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/xe start Starting Oracle Net Listener. Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance. $ sudo /etc/init.d/xe stop Shutting down Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance. Stopping Oracle Net Listener.
(in newer versions of Debian/Ubuntu we can use the shorter version sudo service xe start)
Make sure the Oracle environment vars needed by its client libraries are set. You need to do this in all systems where you will be running client apps (e.g. the django test runner, the Oracle ''sqlplus'' CLI admin tool, etc.): the system where the DB engine will run and/or other systems connected to it through the network (see next item).
I use the Bash shell, see the Oracle docs for instructions for other shells:
$ echo "source /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh" >> ~/.bashrc $ source /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh
Decide if you will perform the following two tasks
- Access the administrative web app
- Run the Django tests
from the same system where the DB engine is running or from another system through the network. If you chose the first option you can skit to the next step, if you chose the second option for any of the two kinds of access then you need to solve the following two issues first (see the Oracle installation documentation for detailed instructions):
- You will need to install the Oracle client stack on your remote system.
- By default no access of any type (SQL sessions, admin web app) is allowed through the network to the DB engine, you need to change that by using the administrative web interface or possibly using the sqlplus tool.
Access the DB engine administration web app by pointing your Web browser to http://localhost:8080/apex (or http://server:8080/apex) and using the SYSTEM user plus the password you chose above.
Create an user to be used to connect to the DB when running the tests. (e.g. djangotest) -- Go to Home > Administration > Database Users > CREATE assign it a password (e.g. tehsekret)
Give the user the needed privileges.
- Roles: CONNECT, RESOURCE and DBA
Install cx_Oracle
Do this in the system where youwill run your tests:
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev
$ sudo pip install cx_Oracle
or:
$ sudo easy_install cx_Oracle
etc.
Create the Django settings file
$ cat oracle_settings.py
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.oracle',
'NAME': 'xe',
'USER': 'djangotest',
'PASSWORD': 'tehsekret',
'TEST_USER': 'django_test_default',
'TEST_TBLSPACE': 'django_test_default',
'TEST_TBLSPACE_TMP': 'django_test_default_temp',
},
'other': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.oracle',
'NAME': 'xe',
'USER': 'djangotest',
'PASSWORD': 'tehsekret',
'TEST_USER': 'django_test_other',
'TEST_TBLSPACE': 'django_test_other',
'TEST_TBLSPACE_TMP': 'django_test_other_temp',
},
}
The key is that NAME should be the same ('xe') for both entries, since you're really establishing two connections to the same database. The TEST_USER, TEST_TBLSPACE, and TEST_TBLSPACE_TMP entries must be different, however.
Thanks Ian Kelly for providing the correct settings file.
Test things
$ sudo /etc/init.d/xe start $ ./runtests.py --settings=oracle_settings.py basic Creating test database 'default'... Creating test user... Creating test database 'other'... Creating test user... .......s... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 11 tests in 2.279s OK (skipped=1) Destroying test database 'default'... Destroying test user... Destroying test database tables... Destroying test database 'other'... Destroying test user... Destroying test database tables...
Understanding
An Oracle instance allows the existence of only one database. This is somewhat different from what we could be accustomed from working with other RDBMS. For more details see the Oracle documentation.
When the Django ORM testing code needs to test multi-DB functionality added in version 1.2 it uses the services of the Django Oracle backend and it implements the by creating tablespaces. The overall of things is like this:
- The NAME variable values specifies the name of the DB ('xe' in the case of Oracle XE). This can be further controlled by using the tnsnames infrastructure.
- Both a data tablespace and a temporary data tablespace are created.
- The names of such tablespaces are derived from the value f the NAME var (or from the TEST_NAME var that overrides NAME for these purposes).
- But their names can also be overridden by the TEST_TBLSPACE and TEST_TBLSPACE_TMP vars, respectively.
- For these tablespaces, an user is created beforehand, that has full ownership and control over them.
- The username of such user isn't the same as the USER var, is based on it with a prefix added. Can be overridden with the value of the TEST_USER var.
- The password assigned to that user is hardcoded, but can be overridden by the value of the TEST_PASSWD var.
- The tablespaces and the user are removed afterwards.
- Some variables are provided to control parts of this process: * TEST_CREATE * TEST_USER_CREATE
In summary, Oracle has the following extra vars when compard with other Django DB backends: TEST_TBLSPACE, TEST_TBLSPACE_TMP, TEST_USER, TEST_PASSWD, TEST_CREATE` and TEST_USER_CREATE
Notes
In my particular case I've implemented this setup by using a KVM virtual machine (host system is a workstation running Debian unstable Sid). The VM got:
- One CPU (Oracle XE won't use any additional CPU).
- 512 MiB of RAM (initially it was 1GiB but the Django test suite execution doesn't push memory usage above that at all).
- 30 GiB hard disk.
Platform is GNU/Debian Linux 5.0 aka Lenny (stable as of Nov 2010) because it still is in its support period and as a bonus contains Python 2.4 in pre-packaged form.
Things to review:
- How much does the Oracle installation pollutes the system?. If it result to be confined and easy to undo/cleanup, maybe this setup doesn't need to be done inside a VM.
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