Oracle port. These files are meant to be copied to the parent directory

dspace/etc to overwrite the originals for the Oracle port to work.
The must be kept up to date with any schema changes!


git-svn-id: http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/trunk@1060 9c30dcfa-912a-0410-8fc2-9e0234be79fd

dspace/etc/oracle/ORACLE_README.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+DSpace on Oracle
+Revision: 11-sep-04 dstuve
+
+
+1   Introduction
+2   Installing DSpace on Oracle
+3   Porting notes for the curious
+
+
+    DSpace is now tested to work with Oracle 10x, and should work with
+version 9 as well.  The installation process is quite simple, involving
+changinge a few configuration settings in dspace.cfg, and replacing a few
+Postgres-specific sql files in etc/ with Oracle-specific ones.  Everything
+is fully functional, although Oracle limits you to 4k of text in text fields
+such as item metadata or collection descriptions.
+    For people interested in switching from Postgres to Oracle, I know of
+no tools that would do this automatically.  You will need to recreate the
+community, collection, and eperson structure in the Oracle system, and then
+use the item export and import tools to move your content over.
+
+How to Install DSpace on Oracle
+
+Things you need
+
+    Oracle 9 or 10
+    Oracle JDBC driver
+    sequence update script from Akadia consulting:
+       currently incseq.sql at: http://akadia.com/services/scripts/incseq.sql
+       (put in your dspace source /etc directory)
+         
+Installation procedure 
+
+ 1. Create adatabase for DSpace. Make sure that the character set is one
+of the Unicode character sets.  DSpace uses UTF8 natively, and I would
+suggest that the Oracle database use the same character set.  Create
+a user account for DSpace (we use 'dspace',) and ensure that it has
+permissions to add and remove tables in the database.
+
+ 2. Edit the config/dspace.cfg file in your source directory for the
+  following settings:
+
+        db.name   = oracle
+        db.url    = jdbc.oracle.thin:@//host:port/dspace
+        db.driver = oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
+
+ 3. Go to etc/oracle in your source directory and copy the contents
+  to their parent directory, overwriting the versions in the parent:
+
+        cd dspace_source/etc/oracle
+        cp * ..
+   
+  You now have Oracle-specific .sql files in your etc directory, and
+  your dspace.cfg is modified to point to your Oracle database and
+  are ready to continue with a normal DSpace install, skipping the
+  Postgres setup steps.
+
+ NOTE**** DSpace uses sequences to generate unique object IDs - beware
+  Oracle sequences, which are said to lose their values when doing
+  a database export/import, say restoring from a backup.  Be sure
+  to run the script etc/udpate-sequences.sql.
+
+
+Oracle Porting Notes for the Curious
+
+Oracle is missing quite a number of cool features found in Postgres, so
+workarounds had to be found, most of which are hidden behind tests of
+the db.name configuration parameter in dspace.cfg.  If the db.name is
+set to Oracle the workarounds are activated:
+
+Oracle doesn't like ';' characters in JDBC SQL - they have all been removed
+from the DSpace source, including code in the .sql file reader to strip ;'s.
+
+browse code - LIMIT and OFFSET is used to limit browse results, and an
+Oracle-hack is used to limit the result set to a given size
+
+Oracle has no boolean data type, so a new schema file was created that
+uses INTEGERs and code is inserted everywhere to use 0 for false
+and 1 for true if the db.name is Oracle
+
+Oracle doesn't have a TEXT data type either, so TEXT columns are defined
+as VARCHAR2 in the Oracle-specific schema.
+
+Oracle doesn't allow dynamic naming for objects, so our cute trick to
+derive the name of the sequence by appending _seq to the table name
+in a function doesn't work in Oracle - workaround is to insert Oracle
+code to generate the name of the sequence and then place that into
+our SQL calls to generate a new ID.
+
+Oracle doesn't let you directly set the value of sequences, so
+update-sequences.sql is forced to use a special script sequpdate.sql
+to update the sequences.
+
+Bitstream had a column 'size' which is a reserved word in Oracle,
+so this had to be changed to 'size_bytes' with corresponding code changes.
+
+VARCHAR2 has a limit of 4000 characters, so DSpace text data is limited to 4k. 
+Going to the CLOB data type can get around that, but seemed like too much effort
+for now.  Note that with UTF-8 encoding that 4k could translate to 1300
+characters worst-case (every character taking up 3 bytes is the worst case
+scenario.)
+
+DatabaseManager had to have some of the type checking changed, because Oracle's
+JDBC driver is reporting INTEGERS as type DECIMAL.
+
+Oracle doesn't like it when you reference table names in lower case when
+getting JDBC metadata for the tables, so they are converted in TableRow
+to upper case.