R – Will Oracle 9i OCI driver work with an Oracle 10g server

Well, I just finished watching an episode of House, so let's try a differential diagnosis here. You know that it works with the Thin driver from both machines, but it's expiring in the JBoss code. You don't say for sure ("client" isn't very definite) but it would appear that you have a JBoss instance on CompB and on CompC, and your code runs happily when it runs in the JBoss instance on CompB but core dumps from CompC.

From the setup, I infer that when you run on CompB, you're talking to the Oracle instance on CompB. Have you tried running the code on CompB but talking to CompA? Have you tried running the code on CompC, but talking to the Oracle on CompB?

The actual errors indicate a fault occurring in native code in a dynlib module "libocijdbc10.so" and we know that you have different versions of the Oracle stuff on CompA and CompB. So my first suspicion would be that you have incompatible versions of libocijdbc10.so on the two machines. I observe that you have a different version of Oracle on CompA and CompB. I predict that the code on CompB talking to CompA's oracle will fail, and that the code on CompC talking to CompB will run.

You want to check the versions of the Oracle OCI driver software on CompB and CompC.

Update

Okay, you say:

CompB can connect, using OCI and thin, to both CompA and CompB. CompC cannot connect using OCI, but can connect using thin, to both CompA and CompB, so it shouldn't be a server version issue.

So, you have this narrowed down. Three connection methods (Thin, SQL*Plus, and OCI) and three servers, and the only one that fails is using OCI from CompC; that fails talking to both CompA and CompB.

It follows the problem is a configuration problem on CompC JBoss. It's still failing in the Oracle-supplied driver; since the same code works against CompA and CompB when running on CompB, it has to be a CompC problem, not a problem in your code.

So

1. run cmp(1) against the driver libraries from CompB and from CompC and confirm they're the same.
2. when they're not, rcp the drivers from CompB onto CompC and test.
3. figure out what went wrong with the configuration control.

We had to revert to Oracle 10 client (10.1, I believe) in order to connect to an Oracle 8 database. If there is a way to do it using 11.2, I'd like to be schooled.

EDIT: 10.2 will work. Here's the official word:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/windows/install10202-083849.html

"Access to an Oracle Database Server (Oracle8i Release 3 or later)"

And as of 11.1, you're out of luck:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/windows/install11106-087844.html

"Access to an Oracle Database Server (Oracle9i Release 2 or later)"