Monday, January 15, 2018

Install Discoverer 10g on Windows 10

Oracle discontinued its support for discoverer in 2014, but there are some clients/customers all across the world who are still using the discoverer tool for their reporting needs. Here are the instructions to download the application and the installation on windows 10.


  1. This product may be downloaded by launching the following URL: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/developer-suite/downloads/101202winsoft-087370.html

  2. Product to download : 
    Oracle Business Intelligence Tools 10g (10.1.2.0.2) for Microsoft Windows
    (as_windows_x86_bi_tools_101202.zip (597,006,669 bytes)

    Ensure that you accept the license agreement and then click on product name to download the software.
  3. Save the download to your local PC, unzip and install the product in a new ORACLE 
NOTE: There is a setup.exe in the base folder but you need to run the setup.exe found in the Install folder.
  1. This download will install Discoverer Administration/Desktop Edition 10.1.2.48.18.

Steps to Install the discoverer software on Windows 10
There seems to be an issue with universal oracle installer in windows 10.
Install the discoverer with recommended compatibility settings, it will make the OS successfully meet the pre-requisites. (If the operating system pre-requisites are not met, then we have to manually update the oraparam.ini file to resolve the operating system version issue.)


You can see from the above screenshot that it met monitor, swap space and temp space requirements. Then it displays the message that it is preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer application but then it just closes automatically. This happens because of a Java related issue which prevents the OUI from opening/launching.
Steps to fix the Java Issue:
Java is already installed in your program files folder as shown in below screenshot.
Copy the entire contents of your C:\Program Files (x86)\Java to an accessible location like C:\jre



Now you should have jre folder in the C drive. Installing directly by clicking on setup.exe doesn’t seem to work so the installation has to be done from the dos prompt.

Install the discoverer from the dos prompt.
1. Click on windows button and open command prompt.
2. Navigate to the path where the setup.exe file is present
cd C:\Users\v-reddys\Downloads\as_windows_x86_bi_tools_101202\install

3. Now execute the command to run the setup.exe and give the jre location path for it.
setup.exe -jreLoc C:\jre6 -debug


It will launch the installer, click on Next and install the discoverer desktop only.
Almost at the completion of the installation, you will see that the installation will end abnormally showing an error and log file locations.
Ignore the error. You can see that the discoverer desktop software is installed on your laptop.

Perform all other post installation steps 
1. Copy the tnsnames.ora file to the C:\oracle\BIToolsHome_1\network\ADMIN location.
2. Go to Windows Explorer and locate the Oracle\BIHome\ Discover directory
Ex. C:\Program Files\Oracle\BIToolsHome_1\discoverer
3. Create a new directory in the discoverer folder.  Name the new folder ‘SECURE’. Move the dbc file to the secure folder.
4. Create a new environment user variable FND_SECURE and give the value of the variable as "C:\Program Files\Oracle\BIToolsHome_1\discoverer\SECURE"


5. Now you should be able to launch the dicoverer application. However you might get couple of errors smartheap error (MEM_BAD_POINTER) and insufficient privileges. If you click on ok and continue, it will open the application and work as usual. But if you want to fix these issues there are few other setups needed.

Steps to resolve smartheap error "MEM_BAD_POINTER" on Windows 10:
Download the SHW32.dll file. (google to get it). Copy/replace the file in to the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder.