Oracle8 for NT w/SP3 & SP4 installed - install + operational problems

Hi,

When attempting to install Oracle8 (8.0.4, actually) on NT4 w/SP3 loaded, I've had a lot of problems so far, but (at least as far as I can tell) I've got one installation that's more-or-less working, by creating a database and the Net8 files (tnsnames, sqlnet & listener) manually. All of the "assistants" were buggy & unstable under NT4 w/ SP3, and the documentation's "search" applet routinely crashed both Netscape & IE, making it really difficult to figure out what I needed to do to get Oracle running. The installation program's database creation script (on my CD, anyway) has a syntax error in it.

Now, trying to install on NT4 w/SP4 loaded (the other had SP3), things are even worse. The Net8 assistant, for example, doesn't work at all; same with the other java-based stuff - the JVM ("java.exe") generates a trap D (access violation) before the "assistant" is even done loading. The "information navigator" in the HTML based doc- umentation doesn't work at all, either. On the machine w/SP3, I still cant stop & start an instance without having to reboot the machine - some part of Oracle (I haven't been able to track down which, yet) goes beserk, eats a ton of memory, and almost every available CPU cycle (it's so bad that it takes over 15 minutes to bring the machine down cleanly).

I've got to install a new copy of NT4 on a machine anyway, and I'm considering attempting the Oracle installation <before> loading the service pack(s), but even if this works, it isn't great - it'd mean I'd have to essentially reinstall NT on every machine I wanted to install Oracle on. I checked to make sure that the JVM was the most recent from Sun (it is), and I've tried this on other machines with the same results. The assistants don't work correctly on '95 OSR2 either. Since this happens everywhere I've tried it, it can't just be me, but I cant find anyone else who's having the same problems (or at least, who's talking about it in the newsgroups). I can't get a response out of Oracle, either.

I'd really like to have an alternative to SQL server, especially one that's cross-platform. But this is turning out to be more trouble than it's worth. There's no way I could in good consience turn this loose in a customer's production environment at this point.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance - I really appreciate it.

Larry Morley Received on Sun Nov 29 1998 - 23:44:50 CST