Connection to the remote database

Hello all,

Here is my situation. I'll try to be as precise as possible. Client/Server Architecture. We have several databases sitting on the server (I will call it Oracle production server) and several thin clients. Our (developers) machines (Win2000 and Win NT) do not have any Oracle software installed locally. Our registry is pointing to that server (Oracle DB Home, Forms, Reports, etc.).

A small group of us installed a separate Oracle 8.1.7 database instance on one of the development box (Windows NT - not a server) for playing around purposes. Oracle database name is ORACLE8. When I try to run SQL Plus on my machine and connect to ORACLE8 database, of course, I cannot connect to it. I get this error "ERROR: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name". We don't want to touch our tnsnames.ora file on the Oracle production server, well, because it defines all our corporate databases. We just want this to be totally separate.

One way we are thinking to access the database through SQL Plus is to have a second set of registry to point to that machine where ORACLE8 database is sitting.

I was also reading in the Distributed Database Concepts manual that you can reference database by global database name. This is what it said in that manual: "Oracle forms a database's global database name by prefixing the database's network domain, specified by the DB_DOMAIN initialization parameter at database creation, with the individual database name, specified by the DB_NAME initialization parameter." For example: MFTG.DIVISION3.ACME_TOOLS.COM. I tried that and it doesn't work.

What other options do we have in order to connect to this development database? Instead of resetting the registry entry back and forth all the time?

I would really appreciate if you could give me some ideas.

Thanks in advance,

Viktoriya Received on Tue Dec 04 2001 - 11:22:02 CST