Using JDBC URLs containing LDAP URI to connect to Oracle databases within Grails

I'm working on a Grails application that needs to connect to a Oracle database using a LDAP context.  The URL format is something like the following:

jdbc:oracle:thin:@ldap://tns.mycompany.com:389/marketing,cn=OracleContext,dc=com,dc=marketing

I'm also not using the Grails DataSource.groovy configuration for this.  I'm managing a separate DataSource in the resources.groovy using Spring DSL.  I'm using the org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource.  I have not tried this with the standard DataSource.groovy stuff.  When I first tried using this, I would get an exception with the following text: "javax.naming.NotContextException Not an instance of DirContext".  There seems to be a bug with the Spring LDAP and the SimpleNamingContextBuilder class.  Basically the SimpleNamingContextBuilder returns a Context implementation, not a DirContext implementation.  You can work around this in Grails by adding the following to the Config.groovy file:

grails.naming.entries = null

Problem solved.  The DataSource now bootstraps correctly and I can go on my merry way.  Kudos to Luke Daley for bringing this to my attention.

 

Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Server

I'm brining up an Oracle 11g install on Ubuntu Server here at home, and I had a need to install VMware Tools on the server installation before I got hot and heavy into the Oracle installation. Here are some great instructions on how to do just that. I'm using VMware Fusion 2.0.4 on a Mac OS X 10.5.6 host system. Seems VMware has released the source for VMware Tools and you can now get it from an Ubuntu apt repository.