ROracle not working in R studio

Question

I'm trying to install ROracle package on a unix box. The package gets installed properly. But library(ROracle) does not work fine with the error

library(ROracle)
Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) : 
unable to load shared object '/u01/group1/home/oracle/R/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu-library/3.1/ROracle/libs/ROracle.so':
libclntsh.so.11.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘ROracle’

The package installs fine from the command line , but just does not work in R studio. I went through lot of threads in forum and lot of them suggested to export the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and reset it.infact i went ahead and copied all the R system variables from command line into R Studio. But it still does not work out fine.

One thing i have also noticed is that the R system variables change every time i restart R studio. Can it be the problem that R studio is not taking path values correctly.

Answer 1

Seems that the problem is caused by the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable not being set in a way that is system-wide. Unlike other environment variables, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH needs special treatment (see the Ubuntu Help page and search for ld.so.conf.d)

I was able to solve this by setting the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH as per comment 15:

echo "/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib" | sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf

Change the echo statement to where your Oracle Instant Client libraries are stored. (Mine could be found by running echo $OCI_LIB.

Then update the cache:

sudo ldconfig -v

Then open RStudio, execute library("ROracle") and it should work.