Installing MediaWiki 1.20.2 with Oracle 11g Express Edition

I encountered and worked around a couple of issues when installing MediaWiki 1.20.2 with Oracle 11g Express Edition 11.2.0.2.0 as the database back-end. The solutions below can be also applied to MediaWiki 1.20.0 and 1.20.1.

I did the installation on top of Zend Server Community Edition, saving me the trouble of tinkering too much with apache, php and oracle drivers.

First out, the web installer did not accept the new Easy Connect string format, even though the help text encouraged such use. The Zend Server environment doesn’t play well with TNS based connect strings these days, so I worked around this by commenting out the validation code on line 90 and 91 includes/installer/OracleInstaller.php:

[roy@lonora02 installer]# diff OracleInstaller.php.orig OracleInstaller.php
90,91c90,91
< } elseif ( !preg_match( '/^[a-zA-Z0-9_\.]+$/', $newValues['wgDBserver'] ) ) {
< $status->fatal( 'config-invalid-db-server-oracle', $newValues['wgDBserver'] );
---
> // } elseif ( !preg_match( '/^[a-zA-Z0-9_\.]+$/', $newValues['wgDBserver'] ) ) {
> // $status->fatal( 'config-invalid-db-server-oracle', $newValues['wgDBserver'] );

The installer now accepted localhost/XE:POOLED quite nicely for my Oracle 11g XE database with Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) enabled.

After a couple of attempts, I found that the installer failed to create a database user, so I created a user manually, I suppose this is a good practice in any event, based on maintenance/oracle/user.sql

[oracle@lonora02 ~]$ sqlplus "/as sysdba"

create user wikiuser identified by SECRET default tablespace users temporary tablespace temp quota unlimited on users;

grant connect,resource to wikiuser;

grant alter session to wikiuser;

grant ctxapp to wikiuser;

grant execute on ctx_ddl to wikiuser;

grant create view, create synonym, create table, create sequence, create trigger to wikiuser;

After installation successfuly completed, I found a bug that was introduced in MediaWiki 1.20.0, where an array would incorrectly translate to a variable thus breaking a lot of SQL queries and making the wiki all but unusable. Luckily, I was able to borrow an existing workaround from the Postgres database script and modified includes/db/DatabaseOracle.php to implode the array to a comma separated list before passing it on to the variable. I found that this problem occurred two places, around line 1165 and 1168.

[roy@lonora02 db]# diff DatabaseOracle.php DatabaseOracle.php.orig
1165,1168c1165
< $ob = is_array( $options['GROUP BY'] )
< ? implode( ',', $options['GROUP BY'] )
< : $options['GROUP BY'];
< $preLimitTail .= " GROUP BY {$ob}";
---
> $preLimitTail .= " GROUP BY {$options['GROUP BY']}";
1171,1174c1168
< $ob = is_array( $options['ORDER BY'] )
< ? implode( ',', $options['ORDER BY'] )
< : $options['ORDER BY'];
< $preLimitTail .= " ORDER BY {$ob}";
---
> $preLimitTail .= " ORDER BY {$options['ORDER BY']}";

I really think it’s great that the MediaWiki team has taken the time to support Oracle database, not too many open source products like this do. The bugs I found have been reported and hopefully these issues will be all fixed by the next stable release.