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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Running Multiple Versions of Oracle JDBC Driver on same JBoss server

We ran into an issue recently where we need 2 different versions of the Oracle JDBC driver on the same app server, because one application needs to talk to Oracle 8.0.6 (pre-8i even) and everything else talks to newer (9i and 10g) databases.

With the newer JDBC driver out in the Jboss server's lib/ directory, the legacy application fails to connect because of the dreaded ORA-604 that you get when trying to connect to a really early DB with a driver that doesn't go back that far. See the links below for Oracle's list of what drivers support what versions of Oracle. The exception is shown below in case you haven't seen it before.

Throwable while attempting to get a new connection: null
org.jboss.resource.JBossResourceException: Could not create connection; - nested throwable: (java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-02248: invalid option for ALTER SESSION

Putting the old driver out in lib/ means that the newer datasources won't deploy properly.

After a few hours of Google searches and pouring through the Jboss.org wiki and forums, we just couldn't find the answer. We finally made this post to the Jboss forums:
We are using Jboss AS 4.2.2-GA and have hit a snag. One application needs to connect to an older Oracle 8 database, so we need to use the older Oracle JDBC driver. For all of our other applications, we need to use the newer Oracle JDBC driver.

But the classnames for the drivers are the same, so we can't figure a way to tell one *-ds.xml file to deploy under the early driver and everything else to use the newer driver.

We tried adding the older driver JAR file and the *-ds.xml file right in our application EAR file, but when deploying it picked up the newer Oracle driver from the server's lib directory anyways. This puzzled me as we are using ear-scoped classloaders.

Both applications are SEAM applications using EJB3/Hibernate. We can get one or the other to work depending on which Oracle driver we put in lib/ but can't get both to work at once.

I've been searching Google and the Jboss forums and wiki for the past 2 hours, and find lots of newbie "this is how to deploy a datasource" stuff, but nothing on 2 conflicting versions of a vendor's driver. HELP!
We got the response the next morning, and it turns out we were on the right path by putting the datasource file and classes12.zip in the application EAR file, but because of JDBC classloader issues, we had to also include a few other files and some extra application.xml config. Here is the complete article.



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