Using oracle instant_client from Python on Ubuntu

I do a lot of Python development in different environments. Ubuntu is one of them. Oracle is not the easiest beast to deal with but the instant_client and cx_Oracle make it tolerable. The way I usually set this up is to do following:

1. download instant_client basic lite and instant client sdk from oracle
2. unzip both into same dir (e.g. /home/jedi/instant_client)
3. export ORACLE_HOME=/home/jedi/instant_client
4. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
5. cd $ORACLE_HOME
6. ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so  (replace with your version number)
7. sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools libaio-dev
8. sudo -E easy_install cx_Oracle

This should do it. You can test it with:

$> python

>>> import cx_Oracle

>>> conn = cx_Oracle.connect("username/password@//example.host.com/orasid")

>>> crsr = conn.cursor()

>>> crsr.execute("select * from mytable")

>>> for row in crsr: print repr(row)  # hit enter twice

...

>>> crsr.close()

>>> conn.close()

>>> quit()

Credits where credit's due:  Catherine's howto for XE