Oracle Client and ArcGIS Desktop Capabilities

[MichaelVolz]

To All SDE and Desktop Users:

I have an environment where the Oracle SDE database has been upgraded to 11g from 10g, but the desktop clients remained at 10g due to the huge number of mxd layers that would need to be converted to 11g in the connection parameters.  I have started writing python code to convert these layers in a batch mode.  While performing this testing I noticed that even though a test computer has no 10g Oracle Client software but it does have 11g Oracle Client software installed, the connections to SDE still work.

As such, it would appear from the surface that this big conversion job is not necessary.  My question would then be what functionality would I be missing if I leave the Oracle 10g client connections in place, even though the desktop computers would have the 11g Oracle Client software installed on them?

Any help or feedback regarding this issue are greatly appreciated.  Thank you.

[VinceAngelo]

Windows doesn't have nifty utilities like 'ldd' to make this easier, but I believe
the sdeora10gsrvr101.dll is dependent on oci.dll, but was linked against the
10g flavor of oci.dll (on Linux, the 10g DLL is libclntsh.so.10.1 and the 11g
DLL is libclntsh.so.11.1, but libclntsh.so.10.1 is symbolically linked to ...11.1
through libclntsh.so)

My concern is for tuning tweaks and/or options introduced at Oracle 11g that
only a full certification test would expose as being missing. In theory, this would
only result in suboptimal performance against 11g, but it's possible there could
be compatibility issues.

I hope it's a matter of,  "Well, 'sde:oracle10g' works, but 'sde:oracle11g'  works
*better*" (the dev team does take the time to apply new best practices, after all),
but it's better to ask than assume.

- V