Tag: oracle

Perception 4.3 meets an Oracle 10g bug: Unsupported network datatype or representation

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Last January, I installed a test instance of Questionmark’s Perception server, version 4.2, in preparation for upgrading our version 3.4 Perception server. At the time, we were using Oracle version 9i. Once installed, our testing went well, and we did not notice any significant problems.

In July, we finally got around to doing the actual upgrade, and decided to upgrade the database to Oracle 10g at the same time. The installation and conversion of our version 3.4 data went very smoothly. Everything ran well for about a week. Then things began to go wrong. When we would open the Authoring Manager, it would refuse to show us any assessments (“assessments can’t be found”.) Then it would tell us administrators couldn’t be found. After a few days, the assessments disappeared from the Perception Server as well, meaning users could no longer take them. After trying numerous fixes, we reverted to a recent backup of the database from a couple of days before, and the problem disappeared. The one Oracle error that both Perception Server and Authoring Manager were giving was “ORA-03115: unsupported network datatype or representation.”

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Troubleshooting Questionmark Perception database connections

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We’ve had just about every sort of database connection issue with our two Questionmark Perception servers, so in the interest of saving someone else the kind of struggles we’ve gone through, here are some things to look for.

  1. tnsnames.ora issues:
    There is a file that lives in a subdirectory of the Oracle folder – this directory may be called Oracle_Home, Oracle9 etc, and is often but not always in the root directory of the server.

    A typical path to the tnsnames.ora file on a server is

    E:\Oracle_HomenetworkAdmintnsnames.ora

    There are a variety of things that could be incorrect in this file.

    1. Hidden control characters brought in during copy and paste:
      If you copy and paste the settings from some email programs into this file, you may be adding hidden control characters to the tnsnames.ora file. You won’t be able to see them but they’re there, and they’re screwing things up.

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