Incanto

After months of delay I’ve finally switched all my database creation scripts to Incanto. The most obvious benefit is that my Ant build scripts are now more portable, as I am no longer exec’ing a shell script wrapper to sqlplus, and I no longer need Cygwin to run the build scripts on my Windows workstation. One of the nice features about Incanto is that it allows you to pass in an Ant propertyset which is used to define SQL*Plus variables for the invoked scripts. I find this useful for overriding schema names and allowing multiple sets of application schemas to be created in the same developer database, for example when researching support issues alongside new development. The Incanto website has a page of best practices including a <macrodef> which I placed in a shared build file and <import>ed into my various Ant scripts.

Incanto requires sqlplus to be on the PATH, so I handle that and setting login parameters in .antrc. One strange issue I encountered on SLES while making this transition was that even although sqlplus was on my PATH and executable from my shell scripts, when I used Incanto I got

java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: sqlplus: not found

Changing the permissions on sqlplus from 750 to 755 resolved the issue, even though the executable already belonged to a secondary group of which I was a member. Note that if you don’t need the advanced features of sqlplus you can still execute PL/SQL with Ant’s sql task.