Coexistence of Oracle 10 and Oracle 11 Clients

Question

I am an asp.net web developer.

I have Oracle Client 11 for testing some functions (EF support), but my applications must be in Oracle10 because my client uses it.

So, if I work in my client project, I need to install Oracle10 (to test it on my workstation), and if I want to test Oracle11 functions, I need to install oracle 11.

My question is how to coexist with Oracle 10 and 11 clients on the same workstation.

In other words, I want to debug and run my asp.net web applications on my workstation and just change web.config to use Oracle10 or Oracle11 client.

Maybe?

Answer 1

While you are installing two versions of the Oracle client in different Oracle houses, they must coexist peacefully. There are only a couple of mistakes you need to know about

• By default, each Oracle Home will have a separate tnsnames.ora file (and a sqlnet.ora file, etc.). This is often confusing if you configured the TNS alias in one Oracle Home and not in another. You can configure your environment to use one set of TNS configuration files by setting the TNS_ADMIN environment variable to a directory containing one true source of TNS configuration problems (i.e. Set TNS_ADMIN to% Oracle11g_Home% \ network \ admin to always use the tnsnames.ora file from your home Oracle 11g).
• Some third-party products are not compatible with multiple homes. For example, if you use something like Microsoft's legacy ODBC driver for Oracle, it will use any version of the Oracle client first in your PATH. If you use Oracle drivers to connect to the database, this should not be a problem. If you need to switch which is the main home of Oracle Home, you can manually edit your PATH, or you can run Oracle Universal Installer in the Installed Products | Environment, you can control the order in which Oracle Homes appears in PATH.