Oracle 11g: Default case-sensitive passwords

January 8, 2008 by Michael

ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

Yiipiee… Although i created my schema with the usually scripts we use, i got a logon denied… Switching context from Oracle Forms 6 to Reports 6… (Please, don’t say anything about legacy apps).

I didn’t notify that passwords are now case-sensitive in a Oracle database (which is a good thing), because of two reasons: I created the user via SQL*Plus and there is a environment variable called “sqlcase” that converts, if set to upper or lower, all SQL code to the according case. Bummer! Even quoted literals are converted… Stupid shit, i think. But in my case, this thing was set to mixed, so i ended up with a lower case password as with 11g “sec_case_sensitive_logon” is set to true as default:

SQL> SHOW parameter sec_case_sensitive_logon
 
NAME                     TYPE    VALUE
------------------------ ------- -----
sec_case_sensitive_logon BOOLEAN TRUE

Now with forms things are different, again. Forms runtime don’t convert the lowercase password in the connect string so i could log in but it converts the password to uppercase if you switch contexts to Reports runtime which couldn’t connect and ended up with the ORA-01017. Weird stuff, as everything else worked as expected, although Forms and Reports 6 are ages old compared to 11g.

In the end, i changed to user to a an uppercase password, so the password passed from Forms to reports is the right one. I didn’t set sec_case_sensitive_logon to false, as i think, its way better to have standard password handling and to me, this means case-sensitive and nothing else.

I found some valuable information on this topic in the following blog: Mark A. Williams :: Blog, didn’t know about that sqlcase shit before.

For more information see:

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