ORA-12571 when inserting records (V7.3.3/W-NT4.0) ORACLE has no real solution?!

Author: Aleksandar Cvetkovic (Aleksandar.Cvetkovic_at_syseca.ch) Subject: ORA-12571 (TNS packet writer failure)

RDBMS V7.3.3.0.0 for Windows/NT / TCP-IP connection VAX/VMS(Application) -> ORACLE-DB(Windows-NT)

I am getting the above error when trying to insert 500 records to an ORACLE-DB.
The embedded SQL code (VAX/VMS 6.2; PASCAL) is the following: ....
EXEC SQL PREPARE Insert_String FROM :hv_SQLString; EXEC SQL FOR :hv_Nr_Of_Records EXECUTE Insert_String USING ... ...
When the host variable hv_Nr_Of_Records is 500 (or 400) the error occurs. If I reduce the number of records to say 300 everything is OK. NOTE: The error does not happen with ORACLE V8.0.4.0.0 (also running on W-NT).

The same problem occurs if target Oracle DB (V7.3.2.3.2) is running on Alpha/OpenVMS V7.1.
Again, the client application software running on a VAX/VMS machine is trying to insert a number of
records (EXEC SQL FOR :hv_Nr_Of_Records EXECUTE ...). The connection client/server is via TCP/IP.
A very similar program writing into an Oracle DB (V7.1.?) runnning on a VAX/VMS 6.2 but OVER A DECNET
connection does not experience the problem.

I simple can not believe that I am the first one trying to write more than say 100 records to an Oracle DB in one
FOR loop!? Is this an ORACLE feature and not a bug?

It seems to me that Oracle V.7.? has a problem when writing "big" packets over TCP/IP & SQL*Net
(timing, handshaking problem with TCP-IP?) Other ORACLE users report the same error when creating stored procedures, creating package bodies,
fetching a lot of rows, running an SQLloader job etc. The error occurs on several platforms.
The error is obviously known to ORACLE but according to the huge number of customers reporting
same/similar problems they still do not have a solution (except maybe: migrate to ORACLE8?!).

Any further help is highly appreciated.

Regards,
Sasha Received on Sun May 24 1998 - 03:09:42 CDT