DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not – but hey, at least it's free!)

Mozilla Sunbird is a calendar project that’s being designed as a sister program to Thunderbird and Firefox. It’s now at the 0.5 version, and there is a plug-in that integrates Sunbird with Thunderbird, called Lightning. It allows you to not only have a calendar, but send and receive meeting requests as well.

I’m running Thunderbird 2 under Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on the AMD64 architecture, and could not find a pre-compiled version of this that worked. So, I decided to give it a shot. It was pretty easy, and the result is a plug-in that works with the AMD64 version of Thunderbird! Since I had trouble finding it, I thought I would share it.

Since I have just started using it, I haven’t wrung it out, or tested all the options. Use at your own risk, etc.

You can download the plug-in here. Happy storming!

There are lots of “how to” articles on sharing data between Oracle and SQL Server. Most of these involve installing Oracle’s code base on the SQL Server machine, then using that instance to link tables within Oracle. This technique does not require that, thanks to a product from Oracle called Oracle Instant Client.

To set up the Oracle piece, download the packages for “Basic” and “ODBC Supplement”, and follow the instructions for installation, on the machine with SQL Server. (This is not an “install” per se – it’s basically an unzip.) Next, you’ll need to provide a TNSNAMES.ORA file – this can be any valid file, including a simple shell with an “ifile=” statement pointing to a common TNSNAMES.ORA file. Finally, set the environment variable TNS_ADMIN to point to the directory where this TNSNAMES.ORA file resides.

Now, you can easily create a DTS script through SQL Server to push or pull data however you’d like. Oracle Instant Client will appear in the drop-down list of providers, and you’ll be able to specify your connection the way you normally do (i.e., “DB01.WORLD”).

Happy migrating!