Today I faced the problem of Oracle Forms 6i failing to connect to Oracle XE 10g on my colleague’s laptop.

I faced this problem before also but never thought of jotting it down.

Now I though it will be good idea and helpful to many of my colleagues and friends in Oracle community, if I do so!

Here is what I did to connect Oracle Forms 6i to Oracle XE 10g.

To make Oracle Forms 6i able to connect to Oracle XE 10g I set the database character set to UTF8.

Steps to do are as follows:

First I shutdown the database:

SQLPLUS>shutdown immediate

Then I start the database in restrict mode:

SQLPLUS>startup restrict

Then I change the databse charcter set as follows:

SQLPLUS>ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET INTERNAL_USE UTF8;

Then I shutdown the database:
SQLPLUS>shutdown immediate

Then I start the database in normal mode:
SQLPLUS>startup

After this my colleague was able to connect to the Oracle XE database through Forms 6i.