MacLochlainns Weblog

I thought it would be nice to walk through the Excel 2008 configuration steps to query Oracle. I was quite surprised when navigating the path, this error dialog was thrown:

When you navigate to the Microsoft web site, you’ll find that you have a choice of an ODBC driver from Open Link or Actual Technologies. You might think that Oracle would have their own ODBC driver that you can use without paying for a 3rd party solution. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. The most recent kits are missing the libsqora.so shared library. The only ones that I could find are for the Mac OS X Tiger edition.

I may have missed something but you’ll find the Oracle documentation here. Feel free to comment with a solution. My solution is to use Code Weaver’s CrossOver Mac, and Microsoft Office 2007. How I regret the money wasted on Microsoft Office 2008.

A quick note, addendum, it looks like Actual Technologies is the best. Unfortunately, they charge for one copy for Oracle and another for MySQL and Postgre. What a discouraging note, but I may bite the bullet on the $60 bucks for both. I’ll defer the MySQL and Postgre until they release their 2.9 version. Don’t forget to also download Microsoft’s Query tool.

I just finished my book signing. Alas, no body showed up. Rumor has it books sales are down yet again this year. I guess that’s because folks search the web.

I think one of the mystery photographers caught me sitting at the table while I was waiting for the throngs of folks to buy my latest PL/SQL book (obviously in some dream state). Since I’ve heard Oracle Database 11g adoption rates are low, at least from a few vendors here at OpenWorld, perhaps I can blame that.

Things are much the same as they were last year, the year before, et cetera. However, the real business of the conference occurs in the Game Room of Moscone West. As you can see the budget dollars of organizations are well spent here.

Hopefully, there aren’t too many managers who visit my blog. These pictures probably shouldn’t be seen by management. Especially, if they’re the ones approving the expense reports, eh? I hope that nobody gets busted from these photos. 🙂

After the soda and snack here in the OTN lounge, I’m Off to a 5:30 p.m. session. Then, I’m heading over to the OTN Night at the Hilton in San Francisco. It starts at 7:30 p.m. this evening. We’ll only stay about 30 minutes or so to visit and then off to check in at the hotel.

Also, thought some of those taking classes at night or in college would be interested to know about the iPhone Developer University Program. It’s new and slick. We’ve actually got a course up and running this term at BYU – Idaho. A couple students are already working for a company developing iPhone applications remotely. I think that they’re calling it insourcing to Idaho.

A Google search that showed up in my statistics wanted to know how to check for external table file sources. I’ve got a sample that should be posted later this evening. If there are things you’re interested in that I’ve not explored, let me know. I always like new ideas but time typically goes to the projects at hand.

The reason for the Mac OS X configuration material is because I’ve been building a server to run multiple instances of the Oracle Applications 11i eBusiness Suite for the book I’m currently working on. Along with that, I’ve been documenting configurations for OPAL (Oracle, PHP/Perl/Python, Apache, Linux) stacks on various platforms. I’ll post my own version of Ubuntu later this week or on the weekend. Unfortunately, I’ve got some real work developing activity diagrams, and they’ll compel my attention this week between sessions and at the hotel.

Two guys I respect, Justin Kestelyn and Chris Jones at Oracle finally convinced me to maintain a blog. Hopefully, it’ll be interesting and valuable to others experimenting with Oracle technology.