BEQ Protocol Setup in TNSNames.ora

Overview of the BEQ Protocol Adapter

The BEQ Protocol Adapter, is both a communications mechanism and a process spawning mechanism. If a service name is not specified, either directly by the user on the command line or the login screen, or indirectly through an environment variable such as TWO_TASK, then the BEQ Protocol Adapter will be used. In which case, a dedicated server will always be used, and the multi-threaded server will never be used. This dedicated server is started automatically by the BEQ Protocol Adapter, which waits for the server process to start and attach to an existing SGA. If the startup of the server process is successful, the BEQ Protocol Adapter then provides inter-process communication via UNIX pipes.

An important feature of the BEQ Protocol Adapter is that no network Listener is required for its operation, since the adapter is linked into the client tools and directly starts its own server process with no outside interaction. However, the BEQ Protocol Adapter can only used when the client program and the Oracle8 server reside on the same machine. The BEQ Protocol Adapter is always installed, and always linked in to all client tools and to the Oracle8 server.

Setting up BEQ protocol

Add the entry below in tnsnames.ora :

BEQ-LOCAL =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS_LIST =
(ADDRESS =
(PROTOCOL=BEQ)
(PROGRAM=oracle)
(ARGV0=oracleDUMMY)
(ARGS='(DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=YES)(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=beq)))')))
(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=DUMMY))
)

It has been setup successfully in Oracle 9i running on Windows 2000 Server.

By doing this, the SQL client will always connect to the local database as indicated in the environment variable ORACLE_SID when there is no connect string specified. For example

CMD>set ORACLE_SID=PROD

SQLPLUS>sqlplus /nolog

SQLPLUS>connect /

Connected.

SQLPLUS>

No service name entry in tnsnames.ora needed and listener need not to be running for the local client to connect to the local database.