ORA-12514 Error
Posted by jt - 09/06/09 at 01:06 pmToday I encountered a “ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor”. This is typically due to a problem with your SQLNet setup. I have an XP machine which had the Oracle client installed and working. I installed Oracle 10g to have a local development database.
This of course installed a new client & a second Oracle home. This is typically a mess & can cause some odd things to happen. I went through all the normal stuff to get things back in order. I had everything working except being able to log into our production database. I could connect to the local database fine. I could connect to other databases just fine. But could not connect to production.
I could use tnsping to ‘ping’ the prod database. But when I logged in with my user I kept getting the ORA-12514 error. This was odd, I’ve encountered the ORA-12514 error plenty of times. Usually once you get TNSPING to work, you’re off to the races. Not so this time.
After a lot of troubleshooting, and enabling tracing on the SQLNet client, I found the problem by accident. My connect descriptor was lower case. Changing it from
prod.jts-blog.com
(description=
. . .
TO:
PROD.JTS-BLOG.COM
(description=
. . .
The TNSNAMES config in Oracle can be a black art. When you are running more than one Oracle home on Windows, it becomes even more mystical. I know this issue has given a lot of people fits. And I’ve had my share of problems with it too. I had always thought the values were case insensitive. But apparently not!
The odd part is, my connect descriptor worked fine in a different oracle home on the machine. I had copied this over from a previously working oracle home (broken when I installed the database).
A bunch of random technology stuff that has my attention. I work with a lot of Oracle, Java, and dabble with various open source software packages. 