Oracle Database Discussions

I know this isn’t strictly the correct forum for this problem, but there doesn’t appear to be anything closer in the Oracle world, and I’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll be happy to take any direct suggestions, or suggestions on more relevant forums (Oracle or MS) on which to post


We have a workstation used to do development with MS Visual Studio, with our
Oracle 10.2.0.1.0 db as the backend. DB is running on HPUX Itanium. The workstation (running XP Pro) had a baseline installation with Ora 10g Client. The developer installed Visual Studio 2005 and Oracle 11g ODAC 11.1.0.6.21 with Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio. This was working for some months until earlier this week when we tried to add 10g Database (enterprise edition), at which point Visual Studio (VS) was no longer able to connect to the database.

Trying various methods of running the problem to ground, we eventually
removed all traces of Oracle from the workstation:

1) - used Oracle OUI to uninstall all Oracle software

2) - delete all remaining Oracle folders from the c: drive (c:\oracle,
c:\program files\oracle

3) - delete the Oracle key from the registry (HKLM\software\oracle)

4) - remove all references to Oracle from the environment settings (PATH,
ORACLE_HOME, TNS_ADMIN)

Next we reinstalled the two pieces of Oracle software that were on the
machine before we began:

1) Oracle 10g Client

2) Oracle 11g Developer Tools for Visual Studio

At this point...

1) we can successfully connect to the db using SQL*Plus at the command line

2) When we launch VS, it reports that it recognizes that the Oracle tools
are installed and available

3) When we try to exercise code within VS that establishes a connection to
the db, it reports 'tns-12541 no listener'. This would indicate that it is routing to the wrong host machine, something we had seen at the command line SQLPlus when the local hosts file had an incorrect ip address. We have also received ora-12154 msgs as we were working on this.

4) We have placed the same copies of sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora in the
%ORACLE_HOME%\network\admin directories for both the 10g client and the 11g
Developer Tools.

5) We have set sqlnet client tracing to level 16, but no trace file appears
in the designated trace directory. This, along with point 3, above, seems to indicate that VS is getting its sqlnet config info from somewhere other than either of the Oracle homes. Bottom line on this is we haven’t been able to determine where VS is getting its tns config info, nor are we able to determine the final form of the connect string it is passing to tns.


Checking MetaLink, we have reviewed notes 334968.1, 249393.1, 340667.1 and 344377.1 and will be going over them again Monday morning. I have also just finished reviewing note 124506.1 on how to completely remove an Oracle client and see there are some other nooks and crannies I didn’t know about.


I searched the MSDN forums and only came up with a couple of hits that were of no value and seemed to show that the responder, while he may know VS well, doesn’t know much about Oracle.

Again, direct suggestions or pointers to better forums are welcome.


Thanks.

Edited by: EdStevens on Sep 7, 2008 10:56 AM