Previously I had problems using my Oracle 8 client to connect to an Oracle 9i database as sysdba. But a DBA told me they had no problem doing this. The only difference seemed to be that the DBA was using the Oracle 10g client. It was worth a try.I was shocked to see the Oracle 10g client download was 475 Meg. What the heck do they got in there? Had to leave the download running overnight. Normally I choose custom installs to ensure I only get what I want. I was able to choose things I thought I would need from the Oracle 10g client. But a post-installation configuration was hard to bypass. Had to kill the Oracle installer process using Task Manager.
So I fired up the Oracle 10g SQL*Plus. Voila. I could successfully log into our Oracle 9i database as sysdba. So I guess the Oracle 9i database does not support you logging in as sysdba with an Oracle 8 client. I imagine this is documented somewhere in the Oracle docs. But I would have liked something other than an "ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied" to let me know that.
I guess I can't complain too much. The Oracle 10g client is a free download. Heck. Even the Oracle 10g database is a free download for non-commercial uses. And if I did not encounter weird Oracle problems, I would not have anything to write about. So now that I could log in as sysdba, it was time to get my password policy changes working.
