Do away with tnsnames.ora - setup your OID proof of concept in less than half hour

If you are looking to move towards a centralized LDAP server and do away with tnsnames.ora, you can set up a proof of concept with OID fairly fast.

9i Release 2 Database Install comes with OID, do a custom install of OID and all its Managed Server Products.

Once the Installation is successfully completed :
Oracle Net Manager:
The Oracle Net Manager can be used to perform entry management within OID:

Start up the Oracle Net Manager. Expand the Directory node.
Click on Service Naming node and press the + button.
On the Directory Server Authentication dialog enter the correct user and password (cn=orcladmin/password) and click the OK button.
Add the service and test it in the same way you would add a local naming service using the Net Manager.
You can add all your services at this step.
Exit Oracle Net Manager.

Oracle Directory Manager
The Oracle Directory Manager is the main directory administration tool.
In this case we will use it to check that the Oracle Net Manager has entered our connection information into the directory:
Start the Oracle Directory Manager.
Log into the OID Server Instance using the correct user (cn=orcladmin), password, server and port (389).
Expand the Entry Management node. Expand the cn=OracleContext node. Listed under this node will be an entry (cn=Service) for each service configured by the Oracle Net Manager.
Exit the Oracle Directory Manager.

Once the above steps are completed, remove your tnsnames.ora and publish your ldap.ora to your users. ldap.ora should be saved in the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory.

below is an example of an ldap.ora file:

# LDAP.ORA Network Configuration File: C:\oracle\oid\network\admin\ldap.ora# Generated by Oracle configuration tools.
DEFAULT_ADMIN_CONTEXT = ""
DIRECTORY_SERVERS= (xxxxxxxxx:389:636)
DIRECTORY_SERVER_TYPE = OID


your connections now to Oracle is Centralized and you can stop distributing tnsnames.ora and connection information. The flip side to it , you have a single point of failure if your OID server is down - think of having a backup ldap server, can ldap.ora support multiple ldap servers - the last I tried we could not get ldap.ora to support multiple ldap servers......................