Hello,
Our customer now needs to run Oracle7/8/9 databases. We have neglected upgrading Bus Objs and are still running ver 4.1.4 
. We have decided to upgrade to Bus Objs 6 via ver 5.1.8 
.
We are in the first step - moving to 5.1.8 but are experiencing the following problems. Any assistance/hints/tips greatly appreciated.
We have installed Business Objects 5.1.8 on a WIN2000 client using an Oracle 9.2 repository back-end. The client has both Oracle 7 and 9 middleware drivers. We found that at first, that Business Objects Supervisor would not connect to the back-end repository - the error message in the attached document resulted. After some time trying to resolve it ourselves we found that when we put the database information (which define where the location of the repository) in the Oracle 7 tnsnames.ora file, it worked.
We would therefore like some assistance in ;
(a) determining the problem ?
(b) determining how we ensure that Bus Objs 5.1.8 uses the Oracle 9 driver on the client ?
Regards
John Caruso
John C (BOB member since 2004-06-03)
John,
First of all, welcome to BOB. 
Since you can’t attach a document to your post, can you tell us what the error was? Do you have both drivers installed? That may be the problem. Do you need both drivers installed?
MichaelWelter 
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
Hi - thanks for the welcome
I don’t think we’ll get away from needing to have both Oracle 7 and Oracle 9 drivers on a single client for at least the medium-term.
The error message we get is (even though we have the correct entry in the Oracle 9 home tnsnames.ora file) ;
Database server error and warning messages:
ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name
BusinessObjects configuration:
Network Layer: Oracle OCI
DBMS Engine: Oracle 9
DLL: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Data Access 5.0\SQBOCI50.DLL
SBO: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Data Access 5.0\Oracle\Oracle
PRM: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Data Access 5.0\Oracle\ora7
RSS: C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Data Access 5.0\Oracle\oracle
My hypothesis is that Business Objects can handle it when they is a selection of Oracle drivers on the client. We have tried resolving it using the Oracle home selector but to no avail.
John C (BOB member since 2004-06-03)
When you have multiple Oracle Clients installed on the same PC, machine sometimes gets confused and runs executables from version 9 client and reads config files from version 7 and vice versa.
Try setting up Oracle 7 connection by using only Oracle 9 client installation. From what I remember, early versions of Oracle 9 client could connect to Oracle 7 database. I am not 100% sure on newer (Oracle 9 Release 2) ones. Try finding out more info on Oracle Metalink.
Best regards,
Ogo
Ogo 
(BOB member since 2004-04-04)