Re: Connection to the remote database

OK, to simplify . . . as I understand it, you have one or more production databases running on one box, and a test database running on another. Your client machines do not have any oracle software installed, not even a client, and so are drawing their software and definitions from a mapped drive that is pionting to your production server. As a result you are pointing to a shared, production, TNSNAMES.ORA file. You don't want to edit this file, and so have no way of connecting to the test database.

Am I right so far?

Even with the Oracle client being pulled off of a server, you have to have Oracle registry entries on the client machine. At HKLM\software\oracle, you can put in the string value "tns_admin" and gve it a value of something like "c:\oracle\" and put a TNSNAMES.ORA file in the directory you indicate in the parm. Also check out the use of the IFILE= parm in the TNSNAMES file. You could use "tns_admin" to point to a workgroup shared TNSNAMES that contains the entries for your test database as well as an IFILE= parm to effectively concatonate in the production TNSNAMES file.

On 4 Dec 2001 09:22:02 -0800, vmalinov_at_hotmail.com (Viktoriya) wrote:

>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

--
Ed Stevens
(Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)