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

CI Setup part 2

BerliOS uses an old version of subversion (1.2) which may explain my inability to set it up with TortoiseSVN. In any case, I found a much faster, more up to date, and richer host for my Subversion server at BeanStalkApp.com. Setup was a breeze, soup to nuts in about 15 minutes and there were no problems integrating with TortoiseSVN. In fact, they offer instructions on integrating with 9 other products (including Twitter).
Next: Building my CIFactory script...

Continuous Integration

I decided to implement a Continuous Integration project. I downloaded a copy of CI Factory and went looking for a free subversion server.
Berlios.de has a good plan so I signed up and started to configure my environment. I also downloaded TortiseSVN with the hope of integrating Windows Explorer with Subversion.

Here is where the trouble began...

BerliOS uses ssh so I decided to use Putty for this. I went into TortiseSVN settings and pointed it at Putty.exe. This resulted in "Invalid Port Number" errors popping up one after the other in a stream of modal windows. Fortunately, I resolved that error by just removing the TortiseSVN ssh client setting and leaving it blank.

Now I get the username and password login, but it finds no repository. I'm going to track down that error as well - dammit!

RESTful development

Last week, I attended Jim O'Neils talk at the MSDN roadshow on RESTful programming. (Chris Bowen's Blog : Announcing the Fall 2008 Northeast Roadshow!: "A RESTed Development")

It was a great talk about the origins and meaning of REST and the usefulness of REST techniques.

Jim posted his presentation here (http://blogs.msdn.com/jimoneil/) and I just found a tool for helping to create RESTful web pages in your web application here (http://www.urlrewriting.net/149/en/home.html)

This looks like a pretty cool tool. I will fool around with it a little and see if it is a good as it seems!

SQL Server 2000 - No wizards available in Enterprise Manager -> Tools

If your wizards select screen looks like this in SQL Server 2000, you have probably selected the SQL Server Group rather than a SQL Server or a specific database. The normal screen will appear if you select a database or a server.

SQL Server 2005 Menu items don't show up...

If you install SQL Server 2005 after installing Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 (with SQL Server Express), you may have a successful installation which leaves "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 -> Configuration Tools" as the only menu option.

At the time of this writing, I could find only one article on the net which offered a suggestion, here:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6141894.html

You can see from the article that it requires you to remove all SQL Server 2005 pieces...

This is not necessary. All that is truly needed is to navigate to the setup.exe on the installation media and run the following at the command line:

setup.exe SKUUPGRADE=1

This saved me some time, and hopefully it will help someone else out there!