Over the last few years, use of the Oracle RDBMS on the MVS system has decreased while maintenance costs have significantly increased. Oracle has been slow to provide updated releases for the MVS platform. For these reasons Oracle RDBMS will no longer be provided on the NIH Computer Center’s MVS systems as of September 30, 1999. All Oracle data residing on MVS must be migrated to another platform. CIT provides another robust server platform—the Unix-based Enterprise Open System (EOS)—to house Oracle data.

How Users Can Access Data

Although Oracle data will be migrated from the MVS platform, users will still be able to access Oracle data stored on other platforms using MVS interactive programs, TSO CLISTs, and batch jobs—with some minor changes.

You will need to allocate a TNSNAMES file to point to the specific Oracle database instance you want to connect to and refer to that alias defined within your connect string.

Oracle Documentation

Users should begin using new Oracle (version 8) libraries. For details, see the Oracle Web site at http://silk.nih.gov/dbtech (South system) and http://silkad.nih.gov/ (North system).

Interface 211 (September 15, 1999)