Working with Oracle in Metabase

Downloading the Oracle JDBC Driver JAR

You can download a JDBC driver from Oracle’s JDBC driver downloads page.

The minimum driver version should be 19c, regardless of which Java version or Oracle Database version you have.

We recommend using the ojdbc8.jar JAR.

Adding the Oracle JDBC Driver JAR to the Metabase plugins directory

In your Metabase directory (the directory where you keep and run your metabase.jar), create a directory called plugins (if it doesn’t already exist.

Move the JAR you just downloaded (ojdbc8.jar) into the plugins directory, and restart Metabase. Metabase will automatically make the Oracle driver available when it starts back up.

Connecting with SSL

To connect to Oracle via SSL and enable encryption, check the Use a secure connection (SSL) option on the connection setup page. You can add other SSL features (including client and/or server authentication) as explained below. You can use both client and server authentication (known as mutual authentication).

Server authentication with a truststore

To configure the client (Metabase) to authenticate the identity of the server (the Oracle server), you may need to configure a truststore file that includes the server’s root CA, so that the JVM running Metabase trusts its certificate chain. Refer to the Oracle documentation on using keytool to manage key and truststore files, importing certificates, etc.

For more information on setting up a truststore for AWS RDS Oracle instances, see the instructions provided by Amazon.

If you need to connect to other databases using SSL, instead of creating a new truststore, you’ll probably want to add the RDS CA to your existing truststore file (likely called cacerts).

Client authentication with a keystore

To configure the server (the Oracle server) to authenticate the identity of the client (Metabase), you need to configure a keystore file that includes the client’s private key. You’ll import the client’s private key into the keystore (rather than a root CA into a truststore file). Add the following JVM options for Metabase:

-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=/path/to/keystore.jks
-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=JKS \
-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=<keyStorePassword>

With this done, the Oracle server will authenticate Metabase using the private key when Metabase tries to connect over SSL.

When running from a JAR

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

When running from Docker

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.