ORA-12154 ORA-12514 password security Oracle

The ORA-12154 (and its cousin ORA-12514) have been the bane of many a novice DBA.

This error is essentially telling you that you have messed up your database naming configuration, whether it be tnsnames, oracle names or OID. The fix is normally quite simple - just correct the naming.

This is usually quite easily done with netmgr, a tool that is fairly good at its job. The syntax for setting up a tnsname is a little convoluted, and I've fallen back on netmgr a number of times when I can't seem to get it just right by typing the entries in the file.

There's at least one other way to cause ORA-12154 to pop up and consume more time than you may like to admit. I won't tell how long I played with this...

The cause is actually due to security policy. While the characters !@#$%^&*()_-=+~` are not normally allowed in Oracle passwords, it is actually quite simple to include them. Simply enclose the password in double quotes.