The installation is straight-forward: just download and unzip the freely available kit. The FAQ provides some basic guidance, and I must admit that's all the documentation I referred to. However that's also one of my minor gripes .. its not easy to find any documentation beyond the few blurbs you get when downloading (I didn't search very hard though!).
Nevertheless, I'm up and running 15 minutes later. Once downloaded, all I needed to do was this:
- Add the Instant client directory to the PATH
- I put a tnsnames.ora file on the machine to help with naming, and set TNS_ADMIN environment variable to point to this file
- Set the NLS_LANG environment variable (e.g. "set NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8"). A must, else you will get an ORA-12705 error.
Refs:
Download Instant Client
Instant Client FAQ