How to Install SQLPlus Utility on Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 18.10

Oracle SQLPlus is the official command line tool for Oracle Database. With this tool, we can perform many tasks to our Oracle Database. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to install SQLPlus on Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 18.10. The installation is not straight forward and it needs some basic understanding of Linux command line. But, I will try to explain every steps.

Steps to Install Oracle SQLPlus on Ubuntu

Step 1. Download the required packages

In order to run SQLPlus, we need two different packages. Go to the Oracle official download site and then select the appropriate package. If you are running Oracle Database 18.3, you should choose the 18.3 version. In this example, I use the version 12.2 because I have Oracle Database version 12.2 running on my network.

You will need to download these two files. Please note that if you are running Oracle 18.3, or any other version, you need to download the correct/match version with your Oracle Database.

You will have files as follow (This is for version 12.2)

• instantclient-basic-linux.x64-12.2.0.1.0.zip
• instantclient-sqlplus-linux.x64-12.2.0.1.0.zip

Step 2. Extract the files

After you download the zip files, extract them to a special directory, for example: /opt/oracle/. You can extract them to different folder as you like.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~/Downloads$ sudo mkdir /opt/oracle
>>> This command will move the zip files to /opt/oracle directory <<<
ubuntu@ubuntu:~/Downloads$ sudo mv instantclient-* /opt/oracle
>>> change directory to /opt/oracle >>>
ubuntu@ubuntu:~/Downloads$ cd /opt/oracle
>>> Extract the zip files >>>
ubuntu@ubuntu:/opt/oracle$ sudo unzip instantclient-basic-linux.x64-12.2.0.1.0.zip 
ubuntu@ubuntu:/opt/oracle$ sudo unzip instantclient-sqlplus-linux.x64-12.2.0.1.0.zip 

After unzipping those two files, you should have a new directory under /opt/oracle/ called instantclient_12_2

Step 3. Configure SQLPlus

Prior to version 18.3, we need to create symbolic links for some files.

cd /opt/oracle/instantclient_12_2
ln -s libclntsh.so.12.1 libclntsh.so
ln -s libocci.so.12.1 libocci.so

Install libaio

sudo apt install libaio1

Set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable with this command:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient_12_2:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Next, add the the instantclient directory to system PATH with this command

export PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient_12_2:$PATH

To make it permanent, edit your .profile file.

nano ~/.profile

Add these two lines to the end of the file

export PATH="$PATH:/opt/oracle/instantclient_12_2"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/oracle/instantclient_12_2"

And then execute

source ~/.profile

Step 4. Connect to the Oracle Database using SQLPlus

Now you can start using SQLPlus. Usually, I use the following syntax to connect to my Oracle Database

sqlplus dhani/mypassword@//192.168.100.51:1521/mydb01

Where:

• dhani is the database username
• mypassword is the password
• 192.168.100.51 is the IP address of the Oracle database server
• 1521 is the default Oracle port
• mydb01 is my database

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sqlplus dhani/mypassword@//192.168.100.51:1521/mydb01
SQL*Plus: Release 12.2.0.1.0 Production on Thu Jan 10 15:03:33 2019
Copyright (c) 1982, 2016, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Last Successful login time: Thu Jan 10 2019 13:58:26 +00:00
Connected to:
Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production
SQL>

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoy it and cheers.