One of my goals in my recent experimentation with Oracle and Solaris was to write some programs that could query and modify the data in a database. In my time as a systems administrator, I have written a number of Perl scripts that query Oracle using the DBD::Oracle module. For my lab experimenting, I wanted to be able to write scripts that could run against the late-90s Oracle 8i I installed on Solaris 2.6. Until now, my efforts at getting the DBD::Oracle module compiled on Solaris with the 8i client have failed. In this post I will write about how I finally got this to work.
Monthly Archives: April 2025
Running Solaris 2.6 under the QEMU SPARC32 Emulator and installing Oracle 8i
Following up on my previous post, Running Solaris 8 and 9 under the QEMU SPARC32 Emulator, I decided to try running Sun Solaris 2.6 in the QEMU SPARC32 Emulator. Someone has graciously shared the CD images for both the SPARC and X86 Solaris 2.6 images out on the Internet Archive. I also installed the Oracle 8i database server and connected to it from Solaris 9 QEMU machine. My ultimate goal in this exercise was to query Oracle 8i with the Perl DBD::Oracle module, but I ultimately failed at this. More on this later. This post will be similar to my other one on Solaris 8/9 in QEMU, so I’m going to skip steps such as how to set up QEMU for this.