A couple of days ago Andrew Barry published a link on dbaVillage that immediately caught my attention. But let’s start at the beginning of this fairy tell. As we all know Oracle obsoleted Oracle Names Server in Oracle10g, replacing it with Oracle Internet Directory (OID). It’s perfectly legal to install Oracle Internet Directory (OID) and use it for tns names resolving (and nothing else!) at no charge. But, do we really need another ton of software to handle something as simple as tns information delivery to the clients?
According to Oracle product managers it’s perfectly normal to expect from Oracle customers (that are already accustomed to deal with multi gigabytes of software and documentation thrown at them) to install, setup and maitain another ton or two, just for the sake of delivering simple TNS information to the clients. Read my lips: installing, setting up and maintaining OID just for the purpose of serving TNS information is in my opinion insane and plain stupid. Just the thought to jump in that boat was disgusting to me, right from the beginning.
I was since looking for a better way to deal with centralized tns management. I believe tnsManager by Andrew Barry is the tool I was looking for. Bravo Andrew!
tnsManager is available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. I tried Windows version; it took me five minutes to download (33Kb), install as a service (with simple command: tnsmanager install) and setup tns manager (by copying tnsnames.ora to tnsManager directory and correcting a line in tnsmanager.conf). Compare that with setup instructions for OID. Compare 90KB disk storage and around 2MB of memory footprint that tnsManager service needs on Windows with resources needed to run OID: first I would need to download around 1.9GB of software, minimal installation would require anything from 1.5 – 2GB of disk storage, at least 1GB of memory on server, all-in-all close to a day to setup everything.

A plead to Oracle product managers and developers: wake up, watch and learn! Oracle is becoming one of the greatest software bloatware producers – long ago surpassing Microsoft. I remember Larry Ellison keynote at EOUG 1996 in Amsterdam, laughing at Microsoft when they announced that they delivered 14 million lines of code with Windows NT 4, commenting that Microsoft should fire people responsible for that “bloat” of code. Well Larry, guess what, it’s time for you to start firing some of your stuff. Especially the ones responsible for middleware. — grin —

Important uppdate [22 October 2009]:
Andrew Barry released beta version of tnsManager 1.8.3 which fixes annoying bug that prevented SQL Developer to use tnsManager as an LDAP server. It’s now possible to create connection in SQL Developer that uses LDAP, sample screen shot from SQL Developer 2.1:

Use “Load” button to refresh the list of tns aliases served by tnsManager.