Regarding the book, both Jonathan Lewis and Tanel Poder (the book’s technical reviewer) have Oracle knowledge that extends far beyond what I know about that product (I have learned from both, but do not always remember the fine details). It is mostly simple mistakes that I pointed out – items that are very easy to overlook when the author re-reads something that he wrote; to see the errors it is probably almost a necessity to allow what is written to remain untouched for a month before re-checking what was written. Jonathan’s approach to responding to my error reports was well handled, with him responding publically, and in detail within a couple of days. The same approach cannot be said about some of the other book authors – none of the 21 errata reports that I filed for the book “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook” have appeared yet on the publisher’s website, so there was little sense in me filing errata reports for the other errata items (that reminds me that I need to finish up the second half of that book review). I put a lot of effort into the book reviews to make those reviews as specific as possible – thank you for noticing.

Thank you for stopping by my blog and trying to use my program with Oracle XE. I do not have much experience with Oracle XE, other than installing it one time. A Google search found that several other people have also experienced difficulty in connecting to XE databases using other software. When the “Could not connect to the database. Check your user name and password.” error appears on the screen, a more descriptive error message should appear immediately after that text (on the next line) – did you see a more descriptive message with an ORA- error?

The documentation, under the heading “Making Oracle Database XE Available to Remote Clients” indicates that you might need to make a change to the XE configuration:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17781_01/install.112/e18803/toc.htm#autoId21

One of the websites that I found through a Google search indicates that you should specify in the Oracle SID box the IP address of the computer, followed by a colon, the listener port number, a forward slash, and then XE, as follows:

192.168.0.195:1521/XE

Another site suggested using the localhost address (127.0.0.1) followed by a forward slash and XE:

127.0.0.1/XE

Make certain that the Windows firewall (or firewall supplied with an antivirus product) is not blocking port 1521. Also, some sites mentioned that if you have an XE Oracle home along with other Oracle homes on the computer, you might experience problems during connection attempts (ADO may be seeing the wrong Oracle home).

The Hyper-Extended Oracle Performance Monitor program connects using ADO and the OraOLEDB.Oracle provider, similar to several of the VBS scripts that I have on this blog. Are you able to successfully connect to the XE database using any of these scripts:
http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/the-sql-to-the-orbiting-ball/
http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/oracle-logging-trigger-creator/
http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/working-with-oracles-time-model-data-2/

In the above scripts, you should see a line similar to the following:

strDatabase = "MyDB"

Between the quotes in the above line, you can try the various naming conventions mentioned above (XE, 192.168.0.195:1521/XE,127.0.0.1/XE) to see if you are able to find one that works with XE. If you find one that works, it should also work with my Hyper-Extended Oracle Performance Monitor program.

If anyone has been able to use my Hyper-Extended Oracle Performance Monitor program or one of my VBS scripts with XE, please share what you needed to do to make the connection work.