Oracle instant client status

Question

I saw some presentations about a very promising product "Oracle Instant Client".

• Could you tell me what is the status of this product?
• Is it really used?
• How is the support from Oracle?

It seems to be kind of equivalent to the thin driver for Java. Is it really something as simple as unzip, modify 1 or 2 environment variables and run your client application?

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/instant-client/index-100365.html

http://www.dbatoolz.com/t/installing-oracle-instantclient-basic-and-instantclient-sqlplus-on-win32.html

Thanks & regards

Alexandre

Answer 1

Oracle Instant Client is still an Product needed to be installed, it just comes with less features i.e. SQL Plus.

You can add individual components per demand.

The Instant Client is about 60 MB in size, compare to an Full client about 600 MB up to 1 GB depends on features you add there on top.

For simple db connection of an Client App, Instant Client is fully capable to fulfil this. The Idea is / was to add some security, since advanced users could do an connection threat to your DB.

Answer 2

It seems to be kind of equivalent to the thin driver for Java. Is it really something as simple as unzip, modify 1 or 2 environment variables and run your client application?

Pretty much, though it depends what your client application is. And which bits you download. If you install all of the packages then it includes the JDBC drivers (thin and OCI), libraries for OCCI apps, SQL*Plus... well, you can see all that from the downloads list. It's a smaller, simpler version of the full client, and doesn't need to be installed, just unzipped, which makes it easier to distribute too.

If you have the full Server or Client software installed then there's not much benefit in having the instant client as well; unless you need different driver versions, or you want to remove execute permissions from the full Oracle binaries for some reason. But if you have a new box that needs to access a remote DB then it gives you everything you need, simply. (Not quite instantly, but not far off).

It's been around since 10g and is fully supported, but like everything else, only if you have a support contract. It's certinly still supported in the sense that there is a new version to go with Oracle 12c.

In some respects it's very much just for client use though. For example, we develop Pro*C modules that we have to compile with the full version, but then we can happily execute them on a server that only has the instant client, to access a remote DB. That's not an issue for Java though.