Niall Litchfield’s Quick Guide To Generic Connectivity
July 28th, 2004 by Mark Rittman
Niall Litchfield: "I have also this morning uploaded a quick how to on
Setting Up Generic Connectivity. This document is a step by stem guide to
Oracle’s generic connectivity, which is a free – but little known, database
feature for connecting to non-Oracle services. The official documentation (this
is
the 9i version) details some of the restrictions. Generic Connectivity has 2
advantages over Oracle’s Open System Gateway products (purchase
here).
- It enables you to connect to any ODBC datasource for which you have a
driver and - It is free. The full featured products cost $15k per computer (US list
price)."
Niall’s document is worth taking a look at, as Generic Connectivity is how
you connect OWB, or Discoverer, or indeed any Oracle reporting tool to a
non-Oracle datasource without using the (expensive) Oracle Gateway products. As
Niall says, the connection actually works via ODBC, and you access the new
datasource through a regular database link.
