Re: ORA-12500 Help!!!

<cross postings removed>

Kenny Leow wrote in message <71uje6$div$1_at_mawar.singnet.com.sg>...
>However, when the client tried to access the database whether it is Oracle
7
>or 8, I will encounter the ora-12500 error. TNS: Listener failed to start a
>dedicated process.

When a client connects to the listener, it needs to create a shadow process on the server that services that client. The above errors indicates that the listener attempted to create the shadow process, but that it failed.

Usually it fails due to the incorrect path settings in the listener.ora config file - you can (should?) specify a path for every Oracle SID in the config file for which the listener need to listen for. If there are no path specified, the listener uses the current environment settings which was active when it started up.

Other reasons maybe due to a kernel or operating system problem. For example, Unix only allows by default x number of processes to be active per userid. If that is reached, the kernel will not allow the listener to create more processes in that userid (this requires a re-config of the kernel I think).

Or it can be a resource problem - for example not enough memory available for the operating system to create that process. Or any of the other reasons which may cause the operating system to fail to start a new process.

I also ran into the same problem with Ora 7.4 and Ora8 on the same NT box. The 7.4 listener could not create any shadow processes for Ora8 (logical 'cause we should not expect forward compatibility with any old product), which was solved when I used the Net8 listener instead to for all the SIDs.

Hopes this help. My suspicion is that there's a bug in the either the listener.ora config file or in the environment in which the listener runs.

regards,
Billy Received on Fri Nov 06 1998 - 06:26:21 CST