I had to return to a project I worked on last year. The first order of business was to ensure I could still run the program. Immediately the thing died with an ORA-01034: ORACLE not available.The program was just running sqlplus, having it execute a script that had a single EXIT statement in it. I was able to successfully execute the sqlplus statement from the UNIX command prompt. Why was the program not able to do the same without error?
I googled around and found that this error happens when your ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID do not match. These environment variables seemed good. I was pulling my teeth trying to figure this out. Eventually I found that the program was sourcing a different profile. This profile pointed to the wrong Oracle home. Dang.
