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Oracle Troubleshooting

ORA-12505: TNS: listener could not resolve SID given in connection description.

Symptom:

When trying to connect to Oracle the following error is generated:

ORA-12224: TNS: listener could not resolve SID given in connection description.

Cause:

The SID specified in the connection was not found in the listener’s tables. This error will be returned if the database instance has not registered with the listener.

Possible Remedy:

  • Check to make sure that the SID is correct. The SIDs that are currently registered with the listener can be obtained by typing:

    LSNRCTL SERVICES <listener-name>

    These SIDs correspond to SID_NAMEs in TNSNAMES.ORA or DB_NAME in the initialisation file.

This page represents one page of many pages of notes I made whilst working with Oracle 7 through to 10i. I now no longer work with Oracle databases, but hope that these notes will continue to be of benefit to others.

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