Greetings ya'll!

When we migrated from Informix to Oracle 8i roughly a year and a half ago, our integrators came in and did the Inf->Ora migration. In doing so, they set the Oracle init parameter 'compatible' to 8.0.5. As such, I am unable to use any of the latest improvements brought about with 8i (8.1.7).

My question, then, is simply, "Why would they want to set that?" I would assume any DBA (myself included) would want to use most (if not all) of the bell-n-whistles that were available to them.

Not being intimately familiar with Baan, is there any reason why the Baan software would require 8.0.5 compatibility set? I see many posts from other BaanBoard members that extol the virtues of locally managed tablespaces, etc. and I can't enjoy the same :( .


Cheers,
FriarTuck

Hi,

I know of no reason why you can't, my Baan set-up had Oracle 8.1.7 with no problems.

But someone with more knowledge might know of possible problems.

Steve

Back in the day before Baan started delivering the client libs with the porting set, you'd need to set the compatible parameter to whatever the oraX_srv6.X was linked with...

Nowdays they deliver the client libs (via ora_update) so you can set that parameter to whatever you'd like.

Dave

FriarTuck,

There are no 'Baan' reasons why compatible should be set to any particular value.

For Oracle, this parameter allows the database to maintain compatibility with a previous version. There can be various database related reasons why this can be useful.

Maybe 8.0.5 was originally installed then later upgraded to 8.1.7 without the compatible parameter being changed?

If you are happy with 8.1.7, and the functionality is brings (you should be since its a good release) then I see no reason not to change this parameter to 8.1.7

James

Dave,

The compatible flag has nothing to do with the shared libs. It is even possible to connect with Oracle 7 products/ libs to an Oracle 9 system.

So, also my recoomandation is to increase the compatible flag to the version you have. That is what you paid for isn't it?

Dick

Thanks for the advice guys. I've got an email out to our original migration team, but as of now there has been no reply. Since our upgrade was from Informix directly to Oracle 8.1.7, I can see no reason to maintain compatibility with a previous version of Oracle that we have never implemented (ie 8.0.5).

I'll repost if the migration team offers any insight. As I mentioned in my original post, and which you've all indicated, there is no reason why I wouldn't be able to enjoy the benefits that 8.1.7 brings to the system.

I can always count on the BaanBoard folks to set me straight!

Cheers,
FriarTuck

Dick,

Maybe its been too long since I ran into it. But I remember having to set the compatible flag (In Oracle 7) to something at or below
the oracle linked library version.

So If i was on 7.3.4.5 and ora7_srv6.1 was linked to 7.3.0.0
I would get an error message unless I set compatible = 7.3.0.0

Could have been a bug, or I could be remembering wrong.

Dave

Dave,

7.3.0..... That was a long time ago and around that time there were lots of very buggy versions.

So it could be:
- that after 7.3.0 internally some things changed
- or it was indeed a bug
As it was that long ago I don't remember it that well any more.

But with today's supported versions it is no problem to place the compatable parameter to the current version as far as I know.

Dick