Error Messages (E)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z #

Error while trying to retrieve text for error ORA-?????, TNS-?????

The Oracle `OCI Client` for Mac OS X is available, but must be downloaded directly from Oracle. Please note that the entire OCI Client installation is not necessary for ODBC connectivity.

OpenLink bundles the only necessary library, libclntsh.dylib, from the Oracle OCI Client, into our installation of the OpenLink Lite driver for Oracle on Mac OS X.

The Oracle Lite driver does require the user to specify the Oracle Home Directory (also known as ORACLE_HOME, or OraHome) in each DSN; it then looks within this directory for a group-writeable file, $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora. If this file does not exist, or is not group-writeable, the driver will fail to function as desired.

OpenLink's general recommendation is to execute the following commands in a Terminal session -

    
mkdir -p /Library/ODBC/Oracle/network/admin
touch
/Library/ODBC/Oracle/network/admin/tnsnames.ora
chmod -R 775 /Library/ODBC/Oracle
        

Users may also choose to add the entire OCI Client to their machine, if they prefer to receive full-text errors rather than just the `TNS-12345` style errors, which are delivered by this single library. The necessary installer may be downloaded from Oracle, via the following link (note - this will require one to register with Oracle's TechNet).

    
OCI 8 Client for Mac OS X (approx 6 MB)
          
http://download.oracle.com/otn/utilities_drivers/jdbc/8171/
          

MacOSX_8171.cpio
These components may be installed anywhere on the boot volume. Oracle has a recommended location, or one may use their own preferred location. The directory which is thereafter known as ORACLE_HOME should be specified in all Oracle Lite DSNs, and the TNS Names file referenced by the OpenLink drivers should reside at $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora.

Installation instructions are shown on the download page for the OCI Client. They currently indicate the wrong cpio filename; this has been corrected in the instructions which follow.

OpenLink recommends first creating a directory, /Library/ODBC/Oracle/, and placing the MacOSX_8171.cpio file therein. Then execute these commands to shift to the bash shell, and unpack the cpio file -

    
bash
cpio -idvmc < MacOSX_8171.cpio
        

The user will observe output similar to that below, and the listed zip files will now be found in /Library/ODBC/Oracle/ (or whatever location was chosen above) -

    
bash-2.05a$ cpio -idvmc < MacOSX_8171.cpio
./MacOSX_8.1.7.1_OCI_Demo.zip
./Oracle_8.1.7.1_Client.zip
./Release_Notes.zip
1176 blocks
bash-2.05a$
        

The following instructions are adapted from the contents of the Release_Notes.zip.

Installation Instructions

The following procedures provide the instructions to install the Oracle8i Client software. The examples shown assume that the directory used is /Library/ODBC/Oracle and commands are entered in the bash shell.

• Copy the Oracle_8.1.7.1_Client.zipfile to a directory on the local disk drive. For example,

    
% cp Oracle_8.1.7.1_Client.zip
/Library/ODBC/Oracle
            

• Change to the directory designated in Step 1, and extract the contents of the zip file. Several new directories will be created as a result of the extraction process. For example:

    
              % cd /Library/ODBC/Oracle
              % unzip Oracle_8.1.7.1_Client.zip
            

• Set theORACLE_HOME environment variable. For example,

    
              % export
              ORACLE_HOME=/Library/ODBC/Oracle/
            

• Users who are using the OpenLink driver for connectivity, and no other OCI-dependent products, may skip to Step 9.

• Set theDYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to include the library location. For example,
  
  

  
      
                % export
                DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
              
  

  
  
  NOTE: User applications that are developed using Oracle Call Interface (OCI) must be linked with this shared client library.

• Set theORA_NLS33environment variable to point to the$ORACLE_HOME/ocommon/nls/admin/datadirectory which contains the Oracle NLS message files. For example:

    
              % export
              ORA_NLS33=$ORACLE_HOME/ocommon/nls/admin/data
            

• Set theTNS_ADMINenvironment variable to point to the location of the tnsnames.ora network configuration file.

    
              % export
              TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
            

• Modify thet nsnames.orafile to use the alias for an address that the listener is listening for a database from a remote host.

• Replace net_service_name with the actual net service name of the remote database.

• Replace hostname with the actual remote host name.

• Replace1521with the actual port number.

• Replace oracle_sid with the Oracle8i database's service name. This is usually the global database name specified in the init.orafile on the remote server.

• Launch the OpenLink ODBC Administrator (/Applications/Utilities/), and configure a DSN, by following the instructions in the OpenLink documentation.

• Test.