Lotus Connections and Oracle

Until now all of the work I have done with Lotus Connections has been with DB2 as the Database, but following my own advice for selecting a database platform,  I will ultimately be using Oracle as the database, so I decided to give it a try now and begin the learning process. The good news, overall the process was really no different then DB2, I found one bug (if you could even call it that), and had Connections up and running in no time.  Following the instructions for Creating Oracle Databases,  in the Connections Infocenter, this created a database named LSCONN, and after creating the features databases for Activities, Blogs, Communities, and Dogear each with it’s own Schema.   The Schema ID is what you need when you perform the Connections install.  The schemas are

Three out of four with fairly intuitive Schemas to match the service name, not bad, just watch Communities.  When you install a Connections feature it will actually fill in the feature specific Schema in the User ID field on the database configuration screen. Next up is creating the Profiles database, this creates a database named PEOPLEDB with a schema of EMPINST.  Once you have the database created you will need to populate it.  having already  created a working version of the “profiles_tdi.properties” to populate a DB2 database I was able to use the same file with a couple of minor modifications by default the JDBC driver specified is the one for DB2  jdbc:db2://localhost:50000/peopledb it needs to be replaced with the JDBC driver for Oracle jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:PEOPLEDB  (if you are not running TDI on the same system as the DB you will need to adjust the line to reflect that) and fill in the User ID and Password lines dbrepos_username=EMPINST (protect}-dbrepos_password=[fill in the password you specified when creating the DB] You can find details on the profiles_tdi.properties file here. The other property files (map_dbrepos_from_source.properties, and map_dbrepos_to_source.properties) required no editing at all beyond what I had done to use them for my DB2 implementation. You can find details on the map properties files here Before installing any of the Connections features you need to copy the JDBC Libraries on to the system that WAS/Connections is installed on. I simply copied the contents of the “oracle10gjdbclib” directory from the Oracle system over to the system that had WAS.  The Connections install by default will point to c:/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/jdbc/lib, but you can place the lib directory any where you want just change the location when configuring the database. Now for the minor bug you will encounter when installing profiles the database  name defaulted to LSCONN, it needs to  be changed to PEOPLEDB to point it to the correct database.