ORA-01034 and ORA-27101 on WIndows machines

Subtitle: Overthinking the problem

Every site on the net which references these two errors:

ERROR:

ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist

seems to suggest that they are symptoms of either the ORACLE_SID not being set correctly or the ORACLE_HOME not being set correctly. Beyond that, they recommend checking the alert log to see if, possibly, there is some more serious problem with the database.I recently encountered these errors on a database whose windows service had started successfully. On a server with the ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_HOME set correctly; with an alert log which had no errors.

I have a simple solution to these two errors which does not involve any of these recommended approaches.

Check to ensure the database is started ;-$ FML