10g

Today I had reason to install Oracle 10g. I always find installing Oracle painful - maybe its just the initial slowness of the actual installer, or maybe its the size of the download. One benefit of 10g is that it offers access to the Oracle Enterprise Manager via a browser (http://localhost:5501/em by default). SQL Plus still sucks badly, maybe one day they will actually fix this crappy product.

Once 10g was installed, I knocked up a simple Java program to ensure I could access the database, and ended up with the classic JDBC error "java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [ttcgcshnd-1], [0], [], [], [], [], [], [] ". The problem as usual turned out to be that I had classes12.zip on the CLASSPATH instead of classes12.jar.

One nice feature (or maybe not a feature) of 10g was that I didn't seem to have the TNS setup issues I had in Oracle 8 - maybe this was due to the thin ("jdbc:oracle:thin:") connection string I was using.