Oracle NoSQL Database 4.x and the Node.js driver 3.x

There are two ways you can access Oracle NoSQL database from a Node.js application. These are illustrated below. You can use the nosqldb-oraclejs driver and you can use Oracle REST Data Services.

In my previous blog post I illustrated how you can access Oracle NoSQL database by using the nosqldb-oraclejs driver. I encountered an issue when using the NoSQL database version 12R1.4.0.9 with the currently newest available Node.js driver for NoSQL database nosqldb-oraclejs 3.3.15.

INFO: PS: Connect to Oracle NoSQL Database mystore nodes : localhost:5000
Aug 15, 2016 10:10:06 PM oracle.kv.proxy.KVProxy <init>
INFO: PS:   ... connected successfully
Exception in thread "main" oracle.kv.FaultException: Unable to get table metadata:Illegal character in: SYS$IndexStatsLease (12.1.3.3.4)
Fault class name: org.apache.avro.SchemaParseException
Remote stack trace: org.apache.avro.SchemaParseException: Illegal character in: SYS$IndexStatsLease
               at org.apache.avro.Schema.validateName(Schema.java:1068)
               at org.apache.avro.Schema.access$200(Schema.java:79)

The nosqldb-oraclejs driver currently does not support NoSQL database versions 4.x and only 3.x. There is a workaround available though kindly provided by Oracle.

nosqldb-oraclejs 3.x and NoSQL database 4.x

The nosqldb-oraclejs driver creates an instance of a proxy server by starting a JVM. This proxy server uses kvclient.jar to connect to the database using RMI. The kvclient.jar from the 3.x version of the driver does not like talking to a 4.x version of the database.

The first try was replacing the kvclient.jar from the 3.x version of the driver with the kvclient.jar supplied with 4.x of the database. This allowed the proxy-server to start, but when connected to it, it gave the following error:

[ERROR] [at Object.getProxyError (/home/oracle/nosqlnode/nodejssamples/nosql/node_modules/nosqldb-oraclejs/lib/errors.js:165:10)] Capturing proxy error: TProxyException: org/antlr/v4/runtime/RecognitionException

In order to get the proxy-server working completely, I had to download the Java driver from the Oracle download site: kv-client-4.0.9.zip (version corresponding to the version of the database). In this zip file was a directory kv-4.0.9/lib which contained several other jar files which were also required to get the proxy-server working. When I copied the contents of that folder to my node_modules/nosqldb-oraclejs/kvproxy folder (the same folder as kvproxy.jar) and restarted the proxy server, I could use the driver. I have not checked thoroughly though if all functionality works as expected. I used the example which is available here to check if it works.

Finally

A drawback of using this solution is that you manually update driver code after it has already been fetched from NPM. When you remove the node_modules folder and do an npm install, the jar files will be reverted to their previous 3.x version. This can be an issue in a continuous delivery environment. Probably the best solution for this is using your own repository manager to proxy remote npm registries such as https://registry.npmjs.org. For example by using JFrog Artifactory or Sonatype Nexus in which you have full control over the artifacts. Here you can create your own version of the driver which is already bundled with the correct jar files. This has the additional benefit of improving performance by not requiring every client to download the libraries from the internet but from a local repository proxy. This also allows you to have more control over which libraries can be used and some visibility of which are being used.