LiveCycle ES (8.0.1 and 8.2.1) is supported on Oracle 9i and 10g, but not on 11g.
The only thing that needs to be installed on the appserver instance that hosts LiveCycle is the Type 4 JDBC (thin) driver which is a single file (ojdbc14.jar) that needs to be copied. There is no need to install the Oracle client. Oracle can be on any port (does not have to be the default port of 1521). There is no need to install any additional, specialized Oracle components.
Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) will work for LiveCycle. However, the appserver system administrator is responsible for coming up with the correct connection string with help from the Oracle RAC DBA. Here's a sample (make changes to fit your environment):
jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION= (ENABLE=broken) (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=TCP) (HOST=yourhost1) (PORT=1521) ) (ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=TCP) (HOST=yourhost2) (PORT=1521) ) (LOAD_BALANCE=on) (FAILOVER=on) ) (CONNECT_DATA= (SERVER=dedicated) (SERVICE_NAME=service.yourcompany.com) (FAILOVER_MODE= (TYPE=session) (METHOD=basic) (RETRIES=10) (DELAY=3) ) ))
Minimum required storage is about 350 MB, 500 MB is better. Depending on your use case, this requirement could go higher.
Sample scripts to create a tablespace and a login could look like this, assuming that a temporary tablespace called "LC_TEMP" has already been created:
Create Tablespace
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Two data files with 500 MB each, set to grow unlimited in 10 MB increments. Make changes as appropriate.
CREATE SMALLFILE TABLESPACE "BLADERUNNER" DATAFILE 'D:\ORACLE_DATA\bladeruuner1.dat' SIZE 500M AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED , 'D:\ORACLE_DATA\bladerunner2.dat' SIZE 500M AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED LOGGING EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL SEGMENT SPACE MANAGEMENT AUTO
Create User
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Assign the roles 'CONNECT' and 'RESOURCE' plus the system privilege 'CREATE VIEW'.
CREATE USER "BLADERUNNER" PROFILE "DEFAULT" IDENTIFIED BY "*******" DEFAULT TABLESPACE "BLADERUNNER" TEMPORARY TABLESPACE "LC_TEMP" ACCOUNT UNLOCK
GRANT CREATE VIEW TO "BLADERUNNER"
GRANT "CONNECT" TO "BLADERUNNER"
GRANT "RESOURCE" TO "BLADERUNNER"
Supported character sets are AL32UTF8 or AL16UTF16. Other character sets are currently not supported.
Oracle whitepaper on Unicode support.
Bootstrapping (initializing the LiveCycle database) will fail with an UnknownLocalException if the Oracle instance parameter NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS is not configured as 'BYTE'. Please Adobe Technote here.
In many non-English locales, this might be configured as 'CHAR'. If possible, re-set this to BYTE and restart Oracle. You can also set it as part of the connection pool properties. For example, the following line in the -ds.xml file in JBoss (Oracle) does the job:
<new-connection-sql>ALTER SESSION set NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS = 'BYTE'</new-connection-sql>
If this is not possible, LiveCycle might require its own dedicated Oracle instance.
You may also get other exceptions such as these:
[com.adobe.idp.storeprovider.jdbc.DBStoreFactory] UserM:DB_SCHEMA_INCONSISTENT: Class com.adobe.idp.um.entity.PrincipalDomainEntity inconsistent with database table
[com.adobe.idp.storeprovider.jdbc.DBStoreFactory] errorCode:12290 errorCodeHEX:0x3002 message:getProvider failure: factory not initialized
Is livecycle 8.0.1 going on 11g or are we awaiting another release.
Oracle RAC DBA is a great help, the more that it can do the better in my book but I feel for the days of 8i when you were more limited and had to understand the code that you created. To many dba's these days are relying on 'RAC DBA' and it will all end in tears, just an opinion!