Installing the Oracle Client Software

To be able to configure the ODBC connection, you first need to have installed the Oracle client
software and libraries on the machine from which you are exporting the data (the Windows XP
machine in this example). You can use many different ODBC drivers, including ones from
Microsoft, Oracle, or third-party suppliers.
We found that the easiest way to get up and running was to install the Oracle client software
so that we could connect from the Windows machine to the database machine using the
Oracle client tools, such as SQL*Plus. We then set up a TNSNAME entry on the Windows machine
to point to the database running on the Linux machine. Figure 2-21 shows connectivity being
tested with the Oracle TNS Ping Utility, followed by a SQL*Plus session established from the
Windows machine to the database on the Linux machine.
It is extremely important to test each step of a configuration like this independently. If you
don’t do this, it becomes very difficult to diagnose where the problem lies if the export fails.
Setting Up the Data Source Name
Now that we can connect from the Windows machine to the database, the next step is to set up
an ODBC connection to the database. For this, we use the ODBC Data Source Administrator
application. As shown in Figure 2-22, Data Sources (ODBC) is available as a Control Panel
applet within the Administrative Tools section.