ROracle package installation failure

I'm aware of the other questions about this issue, but they don't have much in common with my system setup or the installation error I'm getting, so:

I am using Windows 7, 64 bit

I have installed the 64 bit Oracle Instant Client 18.3.0.0.0 along with its sdk and odbc extensions, available from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/winx64soft-089540.html

I've put the install location C:\Oracle\instantclient_18_3 on the PATH.

I have installed R 3.5.1 and Rtools 3.5; both are on the PATH.

In R,

Sys.setenv(
  'ORACLE_HOME' = 'C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3',
  'OCI_INC'     = 'C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3/sdk/include',
  'OCI_LIB64'   = 'C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3'
  )
install.packages("ROracle", type="source")

results in the following

* installing *source* package 'ROracle' ...
** package 'ROracle' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Oracle Client Shared Library 64-bit - 18.3.0.0.0 Operating in Instant Client mode.
found Oracle Client C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3
found Oracle Client include C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3/sdk/include
copying from C:/Oracle/instantclient_18_3/sdk/include
** libs
c:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/gcc  -I"C:/Program Files/R/R-3.5.1/include" -DNDEBUG -I./oci         -O2 -Wall  -std=gnu99 -mtune=generic -c rodbi.c -o rodbi.o
In file included from rooci.h:75:0,
                 from rodbi.c:181:
./oci/oci.h:716:20: fatal error: ociver.h: No such file or directory
 #include <ociver.h>
                    ^
compilation terminated.
make: *** [C:/Program Files/R/R-3.5.1/etc/x64/Makeconf:208: rodbi.o] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package 'ROracle'
* removing 'C:/Users/obrienle/Documents/R/win-library/3.5/ROracle'
In R CMD INSTALL
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘ROracle’ had non-zero exit status

The file ociver.h that Rtools can't locate is definitely present in the OCI_INC folder, so I don't know why this is happening. Does anyone have any ideas about what to try?

Solution

I had the exact same problem:

c:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/gcc  -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-35~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG -I./oci         -O2 -Wall  -std=gnu99 -mtune=generic -c rodbi.c -o rodbi.o
In file included from rooci.h:75:0,
                 from rodbi.c:181:
./oci/oci.h:716:20: fatal error: ociver.h: No such file or directory
 #include <ociver.h>
                    ^
compilation terminated.

Once I looked a lot closer to the error I realized what was happening. It looked to me that the arguments for Rtools was setting -I to R's include folder, not the OCI include folder, and guess what isn't in R's include folder? That's right, ociver.h. I believe R tries to copy the contents of the OCI include folder to the R include folder because of this line a few lines up from the error:

copying from C:\Oracle\instantclient_18_3\sdk\include\

and fails maybe running as administrator will help? Or perhaps editing folder permissions?

Anyway, I manually copied the contents of the oracle include folder to the R include folder and that seemed to fix the problem for me.