Simeon Pilgrim

One of our regular management people (that comes over from the US) came into the office today, purposely not wearing black, and informed our team of this, that she was not going to be dragged down by us Death Eaters.

Hmmm, if that’s not a warning shot over the bow, I’m not sure what is. Quick team huddle later, we are now positive outwards, as we don’t want to be that team that always complains, and everything is always going wrong.

Not a very good label to be stuck with.

But never mind, everything’s still full-on chaos on the inside, what management does not like knowing will now stop hurting us…..

For some strange reason the Oracle 10g Express installation will not run the configuration web client for me but it works all fine for the testing folks. But it installs happily in a virtual PC, and it runs/configures just fine.

Now to connect from my PC I need some client stuff. On the Oracle 10g Express page it has a client download, which you would think would do the business. But does not. The current approach in the office is to install the complete Express server and just ignore the server parts. That idea stinks, so with some help from a co-worker I got the correct option work.

Install the Instant Client, for ODBC (god bless VB6.0 applications) you need to:

1. Download the Instant Client Package - Basic and Instant Client Package - ODBC
2. unzip them to C:\Oracle\ and the will make a instantclient_10_2 subdirectory. The resulting directory C:\Oracle\instantclient_10_2 will be referred to as <dir> from now on.
3. run <dir>\odbc_install.exe
4. create a file in <dir> called tnsnames.ora with the contents
   Name Of TNS =
   (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = your_server_name)(PORT = 1521))
   (CONNECT_DATA =
   (SERVER = DEDICATED)
   (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
   )
   )
   replacing your_server_name with the name/ip address of you remote server. You can name you TNS with a sensible name by replacing Name Of TNS
5. Add <dir> to the PATH environment variable
6. Add new environment variable TNS_ADMIN with value <dir>
7. Now you can use the Data Source (ODBC) tool to setup the DSN like via the Oracle in instantclient 10_2 Driver

Done!

Updated: Changed the naming the TNS part to be correct.

Well as I was told almost a year ago, “you will forget your security badge one day” when going to get a coffee from the other building… and today was that day… I had been so proud of not having forgotten it (solved by me always wearing my badge on a lanyard), I had just assumed I was wearing it. I was shocked when I found I wasn’t.

On the plus side that means I’ve been here mostly 1 year! Time fly when your having fun.