Set up IBM Open Platform with an external Oracle Database

Question

I'm a little confused when I try to install a single node IBM Open Platform cluster using an Oracle database as RDBMS.

Firstly, I understand that the Hadoop part of the IBM Big Insights is not a modified version of the corresponding Apache version (as HortonWorks do) so, when Ambari (from the IBM repo) offers me to use an external Oracle database, I suppose it should work. I may be wrong, and I can't find any oracle reference in the crappy IBM installation guide to set it up correctly (only that it should work with Oracle 11g R2)

So, as I do with an equivalent HortonWorks distribution (but using the binaries from IBM), I set up my ambari-server with all the oracle parameters (--jdbc-db=oracle --jdbc-driver=path/to/ojdbc6.jar, I'm using a Oracle 11g XE on Centos 6.5, supposed to be supported by IOP) and I specified all the stuff I had to specify to use Ambari with Oracle (Service Name, Host, Port, ...) I created the ambari user, loaded the corresponding Oracle DDL (packaged with Ambari) and created my Hive & Oozie users, as specified in the... Hortonworks installation guide. Well, Ambari seems to work well with Oracle, I can set up my cluster until the last step :

• If I configure Hive and/or oozie to work with oracle (validating the oracle connection is OK from the service configuration tab), the "review" step (step 8) doesn't show anything (or sometimes the IOP repos, it seems to be arbitrary). Trying to deploy starts the tasks preparation and implies a blocking states of the installation: I can't do anything else than dropping the database and reload the entire DDL to try again (or I'll obtain lots of unexpected NullPointerException)
• If I configure Hive AND Oozie to work with an embedded MySQL (the default choice), keeping Ambari against Oracle, everything works fine.

Am I doing something wrong?? Or is there any limitation to configure (IBM Open Platform) Hive and Oozie to use Oracle 11 ? (when it works with the HortonWorks - same apache version - and Cloudera Distribution)

Of course, log files don't tell me anything...

UPDATE:

I tried to install IOP 4.1, firstly using MySQL as my Ambari, Hive and Oozie database, everything was fine. Next I tried to install IOP 4.1 with Oracle 11 XE as external database (I configured oracle, created ambari, hive and oozie oracle users and loaded the Ambari Oracle schema given with IOP 4.1, and I configure the same cluster as the first time, specifying the Oracle particularities for Hive, Oozie (and Sqoop (Oracle driver)). Before deploying the services to all the nodes, Ambari is supposed to resume what it is going to install, but it doesn't: sometimes it doesn't show anything, sometimes it shows only the IOP repos urls. Next, trying to deploy, it starts the preparation tasks but never ends. and that's it. No message, no log, nothing, it just get stucked. As the desired components of IOP 4.1 are in the same version in HDP 2.3 (Ambari 2.1, Hive 1.2.1, oozie 4.2.0, hadoop 2.7.1, pig 0.15.0, sqoop 1.4.6 and zookeeper 3.4.6), I tried to configure exactly the same cluster with HDP 2.3, Oracle 11 XE, ... and everything worked. I noticed that HDP 2.3 forces me to use SSL, while IOP does not. HDP works with an Oracle JDK 1.8 by default while IOP actually offer to use an OpenJDK 1.8 instead. I don't know if it matters, I'll try to be sure... I'll take pictures of the Ambari screen when it blocks and copy the log traces, even if there's no error message...

If anyone got an idea, please share it! Thanks!

Answer 1

Trying to operate the same installation using the Oracle JDK 1.8 everything works fine.
I don't know if there is any restriccion using the Oracle JDBC driver with OpenJDK 1.8 but using Oracle 11 XE with IOP 4.1 + Oracle JDK 1.8 works.