OBIEE: ORA-12154 could not resolve connect identifier

I'm playing around with OBIEE using the SH schema (sample schema). I've imported the tables successfully, created the logical and presentation layer when I decided to change the driver from ODBC 3.5 to the OCI driver. When I went to run a simple report to test the Times dimension, I received this:


OK, no worries.

I tried to update the row count through the Administration tool and got this:



Barnacles.

So I begin to troubleshoot. First though, here's the setup.

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate
Database: 10gR2 (local)
OBIEE: 10.1.3.4 (local)

There is no other Oracle software running on the machine.

First I went to Google. Nothing really exciting there, but it did remind me of the OBIEE forums (which I posted to for the first time yesterday). So I did a search there.

Reading through a couple of posts confirmed what I had done.
1. tnsping my local database. Check.
2. Connect to the local database via SQL*Plus. Check.
3. Check environment variables. TNS_ADMIN is setup to point to my one and only tnsnames.ora file on the machine.

Hold up...what about the PATH variable? I've seen before, in my millions of local installations in Windows, where the order of paths will affect how certain things work. Here's what mine looked like (hard returns added for readability):

C:\oracle\bin;
C:\OracleBI\server\Bin;
C:\OracleBI\web\bin;
C:\OracleBI\web\catalogmanager;
C:\OracleBI\SQLAnywhere;
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\bin;
%SystemRoot%\system32;
%SystemRoot%;
%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem

Hmmm...I wonder if having the database path first is causing this? Why would it though? OBIEE doesn't have it's own tnsnames.ora...so it shouldn't, right? I moved c:\oracle\bin behind the final OBIEE path. Guess what? I was able to connect.

I'm not sure exactly why this happened, I wasn't able (or was just too lazy) to find the exact reason in the forums (I'm sure Christian or Robin will leave me a note), but it worked. Yeah for me.