Oracle. So awesome and yet so lame.

So I've spent a number of hours now, installing and setting up Oracle 10g on my Powerbook. First of all, props to Oracle for making a Mac version at all. I'm sure Steve had a beer with Larry one day and that's how it happened. Second, I think Oracle is an awesome database in many ways, although horses for courses applies : many situations suit Postgres more, and I may even be persuaded to believe that Sybase IQ has it's place (not to be confused with Sybase ASE which has no place on the planet whatsoever).

Ok, with that disclaimer out of the way, why is it so darn hard to get going. First of all it requires a relinking step, with a particular gcc, if you want to use it on OSX 10.4 (see these excellent tips). Second of all, you need to set up a bazillion and one users and environment variables before you even think about running the (ugly) Java gui installer (see these pretty good instructions).

So I have it kindof working, but can never quite login via sqlplus the way I imagine i should. All sorts of incantations result in the following cryptic message:

ERROR:

ORA-12162: TNS:net service name is incorrectly specified

I'm pretty sure the tnsnames.ora file is all sorted, so after the 20th try, I search the web. Thankfully Burleson Consulting has this excellent tip:

The error message ORA-12162 "TNS:net service name is incorrectly specified", is very misleading.

It suggests that there is a problem with the tnsnames.ora file contents, but in reality the message [snip] results from improperly setting your ORACLE_SID value.

So there it is. Tripped up by yet another environment variable. What is it with these enterprise software people and their beloved environment variables?!