Compiling and running an Oracle Pro*C-based application using C++-11.

So you want to write Oracle Pro*C programs on a Mac with C++11 features? So do I, and after looking through a lot of web pages and experimentation, I've been able to come up with a basic project that:

• Uses clang++ to compile C++11 source code
• Uses Oracle's Mac-native 11g Instant Client installation with its accompanying Pro*C compiler
• Works on the latest version of OS X (10.10 as of this writing) with the latest XCode toolchain.

Hopefully this helps someone who also wants to compile native Mac apps that use Oracle's databases. Enjoy!

Setup

The first thing needed is Oracle's Instant Client which is available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/intel-macsoft-096467.html. I used the 11.2.0.4.0 (64-bit) version and downloaded, well, pretty much everything except the WRC package (no idea what that's for). I installed everything into and defined $ORACLE_HOME as /opt/instantclient_11_2.

That's the only Oracle-specific thing that needs to be done, I assume XCode has been installed in the usual place and configured.

Files

ora.cfg

This is the configuration file that the Pro*C compiler will use to mac_ora_cpp_test.pc into mac_ora_cpp_test.cpp. It defines the header locations (that took a lot of work to figure out!), along with code type (cpp). Note! The most important part of the file is parse=none. This is the only setting that will allow all the various C++ objects and classes to pass unaltered into the resulting cpp file.

mac_ora_cpp_test.pc

This is the actual source code that mingles Oracle sql with C++. It is hard-coded to log into a database identified as orcl with the standard scott/tiger user, open a cursor to get the employee name from the employee table, putting the name into a vector, and then after the cursor is done and closed, and after disconnecting from the database, uses a C++11 lambda to print the list of names.

Makefile

Standard Makefile with the exception that it first invokes the Pro*C compiler, passing it the configuration file (ora.cfg), and connects to the database for validation. The resulting cpp file is then compiled with clang++ with pretty much everything you absolutely need to have to get a binary. The only exception to this is that if you don't need C++-11 features, then you can omit the -std=c++11 line.