Re: Q: what is ORA-12663

From: Jonathan Gennick <gennick_at_worldnet.att.net>
Date: Fri, 01 May 1998 03:06:20 GMT
Message-ID: <6ibe79$14u@bgtnsc03.worldnet.att.net>

On 30 Apr 1998 14:02:12 -0700, David Doll <djd_at_saul10.u.washington.edu> wrote:

>Hello, I have Oracle 8 client installed on my NT workstation and I am able
>to connect to our server on a sun workstation running Sunos 5.5.1 and the
>server version in either 7.1 or 7.2.3. I can do selects on tables but not
>a desc. For example when I do a desc tableName, I get the following
>error: ORA-12663: Services required by client not available on the
>server.

I have Oracle 8.0.3 on my NT workstation, and Oracle 7.3 on both NT and Novell servers. I get the same error. Oracle changed the implementation of DESCRIBE beginning with Oracle8. I forget exactly what they did, but they didn't get the backward's compatibility right.

To my knowledge, there's nothing you can do except to install both SQL*Plus 8.0 and 3.3 on your workstation, and use SQL*Plus 8.0 only when connecting to an 8.0 database.

Jonathan Received on Thu Apr 30 1998 - 22:06:20 CDT