Contacting Benthic Software

If you are having problems with connecting to your database, please see the information below. If this information does not help you please send an email to support@benthicsoftware.com and we will be glad to help you solve the problem! There are no known incompatibility problems with any versions of the Oracle Client.

Connection issues with 64bit Windows

Our applications need the 32bit Oracle client, which can be installed alongside the 64bit client without problems. There is also a possible problem depending on the version of the Oracle Client and the installation path of the application. By default our products will be installed into a directory containing the string (x86) because they are 32bit applications. Unfortunately there is a bug in the Oracle Client such that you will get error ORA-12154 for any application that has a ( or ) character in their installation directory. To solve the issue, the application must be moved to a directory that doesn't contain the ( or ) characters or install a newer version of the Oracle Client that doesn't have this problem. This is Oracle Bug #3807408 and should be fixed in newer client versions.

Oracle Instant Client

The latest versions of our products should work properly with the Oracle Instant Client without any special settings. The following instructions are for older versions of our products or if things don't seem to be working or you have a nonstandard installation.

Oracle Instant Client is a new Oracle client install that is smaller and easier than using the full Oracle client install. To use instant client with our products just follow Oracle's instructions on setting up the instant client. Then you just need to use the 'Options' button on our product's login window and fill in the OCI DLL field. This field should be something like "c:\oracle\oci.dll" (of course you should use the path that corresponds to where the instant client is installed on your machine or network.) To use a tnsnames.ora file with instant client just set the TNS_ADMIN system variable to be the path to your tnsnames.ora file.

So the steps we took to get the Oracle Instant Client working was:

1. Copy the Instant Client dll's to C:\Oracle
2. Put C:\Oracle at the beginning of our PATH system variable.
3. Copy our tnsnames.ora to C:\Oracle
4. Added the system variable TNS_ADMIN with a value of C:\Oracle
5. Set the OCI DLL field of Golden's Login Options window to "C:\Oracle\oci.dll" (you will have to restart Golden after setting this value.)

Please let us know if you have any problems or questions!

Connection problems and the Oracle Client Installation

Our applications all connect directly to Oracle using the Oracle Client software. Our applications are sensitive to incorrect Oracle settings in your registry (more so than Oracle's applications which are generally hard coded for a particular client version and installed in the same directory as the client files.) Here are some tips to help to check your Oracle Client configuration/installation:

• Make sure you are not forcing a particular oci dll in Golden's login options window (the field should be blank.)
• Make sure your Oracle home's \bin directory is in your system path and appears before any other Oracle paths.
• If you have multiple Oracle homes installed make sure that the latest one (or the one you wish to use) is your primary (or default) home. You can do this using Oracle's Home Selector which should be on your start menu under Oracle Installation Products.
• Make sure you have created your desired database alias in your tnsnames.ora file. You can do this by hand or by using Oracle's Net Manager (ignore this one if you use Oracle Names Server).
• Check that the correct tnsnames.ora file is being used. Usually this is the default location in your primary Oracle Home (\Network\Admin) but can be forced using the TNS_ADMIN environment variable or registry setting.
• Double check your NLS settings in your registry. If you have registry entries from an older Oracle install and can't get things to work you might want to delete your HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Oracle key (back it up first!) and reinstall the client.

If one of these doesn't solve your problem take a look at your connection diagnostics in Golden. You can find it under the Help menu. Make sure to attempt to login first (and then click cancel to go to the main window.) There is an option to copy the diagnostics to the clipboard which you can then email to support@benthicsoftware.com along with a description of your problem and we'll try to figure out what is wrong.


In general our products will check your machine's registry settings to determine the correct Oracle Home directory and then search that directory for the correct Oracle OCI .dll file to use. Incorrect registry settings and 'orphaned' OCI dll files can sometimes confuse our products. A cleanly installed Oracle Client should always work! Oracle does not clean up its registry settings when you uninstall products, so be aware that if you install an Oracle Client and then remove it, that those settings are still in your registry and can cause problems.

Error position not being shown in SQL

Oracle client versions 8.03 and 8.04 have a bug where they will not report the error position. Please upgrade to at least Oracle 8.05 client files to fix it.