…Phew… what a title. But I think it correctly describes (without the use of my signature bad-language) the state of affairs during yesterday’s Technical Consultancy assignment.
A seemingly straight forward, albeit last minute engagement to install IBM Cognos 8.4 Business Intelligence to a single server turned into at least half a day of head scratching, in no small part thanks to the following unexpected requirements:
- To run on a 64-bit Server
- Which was also Windows 2008
- Which required a connection to datasources on Oracle 10g
None of this should have been a problem in its self, and in fact, most of it did not cause any problems beyond having to download the correct 64-bit enabled version of IBM Cognos 8.4.1 Business Intelligence rather than the supplied 8.4 32-bit version. Of course, Windows 2008 Server or more specifically, the use of IIS7 does indeed make things trickier (perhaps another post on this to come?) but the real problem was finding the right version of the Oracle client to allow connection to our Oracle data server.
The customer had previously used the Oracle 9.2 client with their old Cognos server and had decided that as this worked in the past they would proceed with this version on the new server. This turned out to be the first mistake.
Lesson Number 1: Oracle 9.2 client does not play well on Windows 2008 Server; in fact, after it had installed, removal required that we run the OUI (Oracle installer) in XP Compatibility Mode just to get rid of it.
The error message we encountered when trying to test a new datasource connection was:
ORA-12154:TNS:Could not resolve service name
This was unusual because we could use the Oracle command line tools to TNSPING and SQLPlus into the instance. So we went looking for a 10g client, 64-bit naturally, because we had a 64-bit OS. After 30 minutes downloading we tried to install this, it did not run. So for a while we wondered why this may be before turning to trusty Google to tell us that we actually needed to search for a Windows 2008 certified version of the Oracle 10g client. In 64-bit. The link is here should you need the download:
So we waited another 30 minutes for the download to complete.
This one installed perfectly, hooray! We were now ready to test creating the Datasource connection in Cognos 8.
Damn, an error. Again. But this one was different so we were making progress right?
QE-DEF-0285 Logon failure.
QE-DEF-0325 The cause of the logon failure is:
QE-DEF-0068 Unable to connect to at least one database during a
multi-database attach to 1 database(s) in:
[Database Name]
UDA-SQL-0432 Unable to locate the gateway “cogudaor”.
Ok, what does this mean? Well, back to Google we went and found that the answer was quite simple in fact. We had the wrong Oracle client. Again. This was something that had crossed my mind as the 64-bit version of IBM Cognos 8.4.1 is not entirely 64-bit. Just parts of it are. So we need the right version of the Oracle client for the right bits of Cognos to talk to. This happened to be the 32-bit version. But specifically, a Windows 2008 certified 32-bit version.
30 minutes of download later… (here is the link…)
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/oracle10g/htdocs/10203vista.html
Finally it worked! So the end result is, for 64-bit IBM Cognos BI on a 64-bit Windows 2008 Server to be able to connect to an Oracle instance we need 32-bit Oracle client software!
I wonder why I didn’t think of that first!
