Your CS Oracle Account

 

Solaris Preliminaries

First, set up the environment variables needed by Oracle:

      student@host% source /usr/local/bin/coraenv

      ORACLE_SID = [csodb10 ] ? <return>

      student@host% 

It makes sense to put the line:

            source /usr/local/bin/coraenv

into your .cshrc file because you will need to do this every time to use Oracle.

 

Oracle Interaction Using Oracle's SQL*Plus program

      student@host% sqlplus student@csodb10

      SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sat Sep 13 17:58:10 2008

      Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

      Enter password: <student password>

      Connected to:

      Oracle Database 10g Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production

      SQL>

Note the csodb10 part. If you leave this out, you will get the following cryptic error:

      student@host% sqlplus student

      SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sat Sep 13 18:02:00 2008

      Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

      Enter password:

      ERROR:

      ORA-01034: ORACLE not available

      ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist

      SVR4 Error: 2: No such file or directory

      Enter user-name:: 

Without the csodb10 Oracle tries to find a database on the local machine and when it can't find it, throws that error. If you make this mistake you can recover by giving your username with the csodb10 and then your password as normal. Oracle will do the right thing from there.

 

Changing the initial password

Users can change their own password with the following: (assume you've already started up SQL*Plus)

      SQL> password

      Changing password for STUDENT

      Old password: <old password>

      New password: <new password>

      Retype new password: <new password>

      Password changed

      SQL> 

Things to note:

            Oracle passwords are not case sensitive. Foo is the same as FOO is the same as fOO. This is different from normal UNIX passwords. Also, using an '@' in your password will lead to heartache. The Oracle client sees the '@' and anything after it as a specification for a database other than csodb10.

 

Additional Reading

• Check with your professor who surely has plenty of plans for you.
• http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/2207/sql1.html
• http://sqlzoo.net/
• http://docs.oracle.com/
  This link points to the substantial Oracle documentation available online. Note that these documents tend to be often more of a reference variety rather than an introductory stuff. Oracle also has a full suite of very good, but very expensive books you can buy.