Short note to record this, as Google drew no hits on it. Windows XP machine with existing Oracle 11.1 client installation, all working fine. Installed Oracle 11.2 XE, and started getting these errors: [sourcecode] C:\Windows\System32>tnsping DBNAME TNS Ping Utility for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.2.0.2.0 - Production on 26-SEP-2011 11:01:11 Copyright (c) 1997, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved. Used parameter files: C:\app\userid\product\11.1.0\client_1\network\admin\sqlnet.ora Used TNSNAMES adapter to resolve the alias Message 3513 not found; product=NETWORK; facility=TNS OK (20 msec) [/sourcecode]

Oracle XE 11gR2 beta has just been released, some details here and download here. It’s not a great deal of use for sandboxing DWH-specific stuff, given this list of excluded functionality (and this is by no means everything that’s not included): Bitmapped index, bitmapped join index, and bitmap plan conversions Oracle Partitioning Parallel Data Pump Export/Import Parallel query/DML Parallel Statement Queuing (source) However, it’s always interesting to have to hand for trying out other things.