The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - help: ASP provider error

help: ASP provider error - Catastrophic Failure

Hi all,
I wonder if anyone can assist me.

I'm using the following strings in ASP to connect to an Oracle 8i source. The requesting page is on a NT 4.0 Web server and the Oracle database is on a separate server.

set Conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Conn.Open "DSN=********;UID=********;PASSWORD=********"

I get the error "Provider error '8000ffff' - Catastrophic failure" about 3 out of 5 times (inconsistent), when I refresh the page.

We have 4 web-apps running on the same web-server accessing the same DBServer. Previously the 3 applications work OK but then when we add the new application above sometimes the error messages occur for the 3 apps.

Thanks,

Pete Goldberg
Wednesday, February 4, 2004

A couple of things to try:

(1) It's generally better to use a DSN-less connection string, similar to:
"Provider=MSDAORA;Data Source=OracleServiceName;User ID=OracleUser;Password=OraclePwd;"

(2) If the Oracle database server is a fast machine, you may be encountering a problem with the connections being closed and re-opened too quickly (or something like that). We started encountering this a while ago and added some code that, if it encountered an error opening the connection, waited a fraction of a second and tried again - this solved our internittent Oracle connection open failures.

Philip Dickerson
Wednesday, February 4, 2004