Calling All Geeks!

Of your goodness, dear readers, I need recommendations for an inexpensive X client for Windows.

I get to play DBA today, on the Solaris server that's all mine (my precious!). I'm a little daunted at the task, because

• I haven't worked in X for about 6 years
• I haven't worked with a version of Oracle later than 8i (yes - the government network I work on just upgraded from 8i to 9i in the last quarter of 2006), and this is 10 (g I think?)
• I am a designer and developer, not a DBA
  
• I will have to learn how to manage and use BI Discoverer
• I received last week a 12-pound box of Oracle CBTs that go over all this stuff - like I have two weeks to spend perusing CBTs when I have work to do!

I am reminded of my assembly language class in college. In assembly language, you're programming just one level above the ones and zeroes (bit-twiddling, as we called it), so it's very easy to mess things up. We were using 8088s, and all our work was on 3.5" floppies. I once succeeded in turning on the "busy" light on the floppy drive - even though it was not accessing the disk - and then locking up the entire machine. What fun!

I'd prefer not to do this in a professional environment, and have to call the guys in Minnesota several times in a day to ask them to hit the reset button for me, because I've hosed the server again.

UPDATE: Holy crap! It turns out that I have to install Oracle 10g. And Warehouse Builder. And BI Discoverer. And make sure they're all patched and updated. Oh yeah, and have all that financial information ready for the program management review next week. I am toast.

UPDATE #2: Okay, so it's not quite that bad. It looks like all those components are installed, just not running. Of course, I have no idea what gets kicked off in what order, so more research is in order. I'm pretty good at research, but I don't like having to be researching when I want to be doing. It's turning into a roller-coaster of a day.