I have just had a heck of a time with installing BPA (Architect) Evaluation on a Windows Server 2003 machine. There were no inherent issues with the product itself, but some gotchas that I thought I might point out. For the following, I assumed you are installing on a single machine for testing/evaluation purposes like I was.

For one, if you were familiar with BPA 10.1.3.3, there is no longer an auto-installable olite database option. You must use Oracle XE Universal (or better) and you should have it installed locally prior to installing BPA. Note: You should use XE Universal specifically so you get the AL32UTF8 character set that is expected by the BPA install.

After I got the character set squared away, I continued to receive a database connection error during the install. My XE DB was working fine, I could log in, sqlplus, etc., etc. I did some digging and found the following file:

c:\program files\oracle bpa suite10.1.3.4\testsql.txt

In here, the first line started with “C:\XEClient\bin\tnsping”

My XE Client, however, does not have the tnsping utility. So, I copied over the bin directory files from the XE DB bin into the XE Client bin to get the various tools the installation might be leveraging, and sure enough, everything went through smoothly.

So, if you get into trouble during the install while setting up the DB/connection, take a look at that testsql.txt file and you can likely troubleshoot those commands individually to see where your problem lies. Good luck!

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