Starting in v0.20.0, Metabase provides a driver for connecting to Oracle databases. Under the hood, Metabase uses Oracle’s JDBC driver; due to licensing restrictions, we can’t include it as part of Metabase. Luckily, downloading it yourself and making it available to Metabase is straightforward and only takes a few minutes.
You can download the JDBC driver from Oracle’s JDBC driver downloads page.
Head to this page, accept the license agreement, and download ojdbc8.jar:
Before downloading this JAR you may need to sign up for a free account with Oracle. We have had success with the latest version at the time of this writing, 19.3 (even with older Oracle 12c databases), but any version should work.
Metabase will automatically make the Oracle driver available if it finds the Oracle JDBC driver JAR in the Metabase plugins directory when it starts up. All you need to do is create the directory, move the JAR you just downloaded into it, and restart Metabase.
By default, the plugins directory is called plugins, and lives in the same directory as the Metabase JAR.
For example, if you’re running Metabase from a directory called /app/, you should move the Oracle JDBC driver JAR to /app/plugins/:
# example directory structure for running Metabase with Oracle support
/app/metabase.jar
/app/plugins/ojdbc8.jar
If you’re running Metabase from the Mac App, the plugins directory defaults to ~/Library/Application Support/Metabase/Plugins/:
# example directory structure for running Metabase Mac App with Oracle support
/Users/camsaul/Library/Application Support/Metabase/Plugins/ojdbc8.jar
Finally, you can choose a custom plugins directory if the default doesn’t suit your needs by setting the environment variable MB_PLUGINS_DIR.
The process for adding plugins when running via Docker is similar, but you’ll need to mount the plugins directory. Refer to instructions here for more details.