I have tried for the past three week to get Oracle up and running. I have spend more time reviewing Oracle DOC's that I would have liked. Oracle Installation is very poor... to say the least... There product is a good one BUT.... the free software... well you get what you pay for... For JAVA and JDBC I'm an back to ms-access and ibm-db2... At lest these products work .... If you have db2 (?) send them my way... Monty6 ------------------