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August 30, 2006
Give me an "O" for Oracle
jrew.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close
F*cking jrew, I thought. It's responsible for every software crash and blue screen of death since the dawn of man!!"
"Sugar Tits!" I screamed at my assistant. "Get in here with my Mountain Dew and be prepared to stay late. We've got some coding to do!"
Okay. Well, I don't have an assistant. I don't drink Mountain Dew either. And my coding is so poor it's all I can do to keep Microsoft from hiring me and moving me to Redmond.
I did have a problem with JREW.EXE yesterday. And some non-JREW.EXE issues. Ones that lasted 9 hours.
I've mentioned a problem with Oracle Clients before. The preferred client -- the one we've been using since day one -- has a timeout feature that kicks out an ODBC error if a query runs too long. A newer client ... one that is just .0001 versions newer (or thereabouts) allows the query timeout feature to be deselected.
So, the newer client (clients, actually -- we have a couple of versions) are better? Right? Well, sometimes they break Microsoft Access queries that have been running like gangbusters for years. And then those queries need to be rewritten. And some of them are a bitch.
The newer clients also break Cognos -- which I'm able to fix in just a few minutes. Now, I can fix them in a couple of minutes -- I invested a couple of hours learning how to do this several months ago. But now, I can do it in a couple of minutes. Unless, of course, my week has been a non-stop barrage of things-that-never-happen actually happening and Cognos not accepting the fix is one of a list of bizarre things that could happen too to make the week even weirder.
At 2 p.m. I sat at a coworkers PC to fix Cognos. I'd installed a newer Oracle client earlier in the week to fix the query timeout problem. I'd also applied the Cognos fix ... and it was not working.
Yada yada yada. I edited the registry. I blew out and installed several sets of Java Runtime files (The "J" and the "R" part of JREW for those of you who don't know and haven't been bored to tears yet).
I uninstalled and reinstalled a couple of Oracle clients.
The one that works for everyone else (and may not break as many Access queries) wouldn't even begin to install. I'd get an hour glass when I clicked the Setup icon and then nothing.
At one point I thought I'd get tricky and use the Universal Installer from an even newer version to install the older files. (Say it with me people! U-NI-VER-SAL). It tried really really hard to work and hung about 80% through. Universal crap never works ... universal windshield wiper blades ... universal mounting brackets for something you need mounted ... all crap. Even Kirk had trouble with the universal translator every once in a while.
I did a custom install -- deselecting things I didn't need -- and tried again.
It looked good. Eighty, ninety, boom one-hundred percent! And then the message advising me that a component wasn't able to install. Naturally it was the component I needed.
Sometimes things would look great and when I went to tweak settings I'd get the JREW.EXE error. Or I'd find that the Oracle Data Access Component I needed wasn't showing up in the ODBC Administrator. Or that it seemed to be there, but instead of a version number -- which would verify that things would work -- there would be a text string advising me that my coworkers were at home watching How I Met Your Mother while I was getting screwed by software; this message would eventually change to Two and a Half Men, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and, finally, Deep Throat (I assume the software was channeling for some of the sales guys at that point).
I finally downloaded an 80 meg file from Oracle -- it was a newer client than either I had. But just barely newer. It started installing and then crashed with a JREW error.
However. Enough of it installed that when I next tried to reinstall one of the clients I'd tried to install before ... it worked!
I was home just before the 11 o'clock news.
Ah. I really should have mentioned that I was awakened Monday -- just after 6 a.m. -- by a call from a co-worker. Our ERP package was down. Tuesday morning I was awakened by a call from a coworker (7 a.m. this time) to let me know the ERP package was down again. (Monday's error was do to an overnight reboot hanging. Tuesday's was a result of a step I'd missed in when I performed some maintenance on Monday.)
Posted by delmer at August 30, 2006 12:04 AM