Scott,
Sometimes, it is tricky for the Oracle tnsnames.ora configuration entry, the connection string may contain unknown characters. This is happening mostly because of the cut and paste from different editors into the tnsnames.ora file. You may try to connect using sqlplus again by using(for example) $> sqlplus user/pass@myoracledatabase myoracledatabase is an entry in tnsnames.ora looks like: myoracledatabase = (ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.168.15.200)(PORT=1535)))( CONNECT_DATA=(SID=PROD77))) It is different than typing the whole connection description in the command prompt as it will bypass tnsnames.ora entry. ODBC is looking for the tnsnames.ora entry for connection description, so using the above connection method, I bet it will fail also. If this is the case, that means your tnsnames.ora entry is somehow corrupted by the unknown characters. What I am usually do is to type the tnsnames.ora entry manually, it should fix your problem. Hope this is the case. Alan From: Scott Stansbury [mailto:sstansb...@aol.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 1:17 PM To: Kong, Alan Cc: dbi-users@perl.org Subject: Re: :ODBC fails, SQL*Plus works On Oct 5, 2011, at 1:00 PM, Kong, Alan wrote: Since you are using DBI::ODBC, you should create an ODBC data source pointing to your Oracle database first, and then calling the connect function by passing the data source name you just created for ODBC data source. That's our standard config, but in this case that is failing also. Configuring the DSN via the ODBC Data Source Administrator control panel and hitting "Test Connection" yields the same error: Unable to connect SQLState=08004 [Oracle][ODBC][Ora]ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified. I added the connection parameters and credentials to the script to see if it was windows talking to the Oracle InstantClient ODBC layer that was causing the problem... Scott...
