VS.NET 2003, Visual Database Tools, Oracle 8i

[Kevin Nechodom]

In July 2003, there was a post by Srinivas Kanakapally [MSFT]:

In VS .Net 2002, with respect to Oracle we officially supported database
designing only against version 7.3. Though users were using this
functionality against Oracle8i and Oracle9i, it was never officially
supported.

Due to changes in the database model used for Oracle 8.0 and later, Visual
Studio .NET 2003 (VS2003) no longer allows this functionality as it might
cause corruption of user data. So, if you attempt to implement one of these
functions, you will get one of the following errors:

"This back-end version is not supported to design database diagrams or
tables"

- or -

"This back-end version is not supported to design views"

I actually started having this error when a database was upgraded to
9i, but after upgrading to VS 2003, I am now unable to update
anything, quite in line with this message.

What do I do about it? I have been using VS as a tool to create
tables, make changes, and when the change is problematic, script the
change. I can now do none of these things. What is the Microsoft
suggestion for this loss of functionality? I know I can use Visio for
some of this; has it been upgraded to handle non-destructive table
changes?

Thanks for any insight.

Kevin Nechodom
University of Utah MBM