January 11, 2005
Order Is Important
When installing Oracle software. Yesterday I was reminded of this when I violated Andrew's first rule of Oracle software - install the oldest stuff first.
I've got all sorts of things on my machine at work, OWB 9.2, OWB 10g, an Oracle 9i database and even the great crutch TOAD. Then I tried to install Applications Desktop Integrator (no home page for that product) and the whole pile came crashing down.
This is because ADI uses the Oracle 8 technology stack. It precedes such new fangled ideas as having more than one Oracle product installed on your machine at once.
So it installed itself in my OWB 9.2 Oracle home and completely ruined the networking component. I won't go into the messy details, but essentially ADI relies on the Net8 OCI layer and OWB 9.2 uses the Oracle 9i Net component. It is, of course, backwardly compatible but the ADI installer doesn't know that so it just blindly installs Net8 into my nice (working) OWB 9.2 home. Misery ensues.
If I had the patience of a saint I could get this stack of software working. I would have to cleanse my machine of every trace of Oracle (which includes hacking the registry because the Oracle un-installers are terrible) and then install, in order;
- Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator
- Oracle Warehouse Builder 9.2 (in a new Oracle home)
- Oracle Database 9i (in yet another Oracle home)
Estimated elapsed time - about a day. But that wouldn't be a smart or valuable use of my time, so we've scared up a fresh machine and after it's been re-imaged I'm going to install ADI on that. Then it can exist in a kind of de-militarised zone and not infect any of the working software on my desktop.
One of these days this arcane knowledge will be useless. Until then welcome to Oracle's very own version of DLL hell.
Posted by Andy Todd at January 11, 2005 12:36 PM