Recently at a gathering I was asked about my job. I told a group of young chaps that I work with Oracle EBS and my primary role is developing extensions using Oracle Forms & Reports. Interestingly, none of them knew anything about Oracle Forms & Reports.

Couple of days back I installed Oracle 11G R2 database once “again” as I had to open our legacy software for some historical data access. Then I had to develop a report and to my utter surprise, found Oracle 10g report developer will not connect to 11G database, generating the following errors:

REP-0501: Unable to connect to the specified database.
ORA-12640: Authentication adapter initialization failed

I hurried to check the database sqlnet.ora file and found the authentication set as NTS (Windows default for Oracle products) & interestingly Developer 6i products were connecting to the database without any issues. This helped me to confirm that issues were from Developer 10g side & I changed the sqlnet.ora settings for the Developer 10g Suite.

from NTS to NONE did the trick.

I don’t know how my people are ever going to land on this page! Trust me, I haven’t seen an interesting question about Oracle Forms/Reports in any of the Oracle support forums from last many years. I will be pretty sad to see such a wonderful product that was built for developing Business applications on the go being ignored for some crappy browser based gimmicks.

Happy Diwali guys 🙏