Returning "system views" as tables.

My company has outsourced our billing system to an out-of-town company that uses Oracle 8i.

We were provided with the Oracle 8i client, which I have installed on my Win2K server, and I am configuring the DNS for use.

I can successfully connect to the database with SQL*Plus, and can also successfully connect to the database from within Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Dreamweaver MX.

The problem I am having is getting the system tables to show up visually in my development environments. When I see the list of available tables, I only see three, created under the "scott" user. The system tables are not visible, which is where all of my customer information lies.

Now, from what I have been told, the system tables have been shared to my user account as system views. And if I manually execute a SQL query (i.e. type out the SELECT command...), I can pull a recordset from the system tables. So I know I have read access to this data.

Since I did not design the database structure and am not very familiar with the myriad of complexities our "outsourced" programmers build into it, it would be a great boon to be able to visually browse the table structures, column names, etc. so that I can build my queries from within MSSQL and Dreamweaver.

I've searched through the documenation I have for Oracle, for the ODBC drivers and through UseNet.

I found one article that the older version of the Microsoft ODBC Driver (version 2.0) contained a custom option called "Return system views as system table" which could be checked. I am SURE this is what I need.

However, the current version of the driver (2.5) does not have this option. I also haven't found a way to download the old version and downgrade my MDAC.

Does anyone know of any way I could enable this feature?

Any help would be a godsend.

Thanks much,
Jeffrey Received on Sun Sep 01 2002 - 17:50:47 CDT