Re: Watch what you call your ORACLE_SID!

Young_at_Heart.com (Bagpuss) wrote:
> Apparently, when connecting remotely, or even locally, via TCP/IP (at
> least) if there is any file in your ORACLE_PATH that matches your
> ORACLE_SID you may encounter the same problem as me i.e. an 'ORACLE
> NOT AVAILABLE...' error. (Oracle was, in fact, more available tham a
> certain Miss Lewinsky). Iam using Unixware 2.1.2 and Oracle 7.3.3.
>
> I post this in the hope that no-one reading it will ever be bamboozled
> by this perplexing and ultimately time-consuming problem!!

This is a very similar problem to the one I described in my posting: "Warning: avoid env. variables ARCH, PMON, DBWR etc." If you use truss ( Solaris ) or trace ( AIX ) or some other system-call monitoring tool, you'll see that the Oracle executables look in all sorts of obscure places, and use the values of all sorts of environment variables, to determine where to find the modules they need. Quite often they look in the obscure places before they look in the documented places. This makes it very easy to trip them up by having files or directories which have the same name as your ORACLE_SID, or by creating environment variables with names which Oracle have reserved for their own use, but failed to warn you about. Here's another one: avoid having a file lying around called ora_pmon_${ORACLE_SID} or ora_smon_${ORACLE_SID} etc.

Dave.
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Remove the no-spam bit from my email address to reply. Received on Wed Oct 07 1998 - 03:50:35 CDT