I agree. Oracle just never gave restructuring tnsnames.ora high priority. If they do, XML may be a choice. Once it's restructured, the official suggestion you always use tool to edit tnsnames.ora can be dropped. For some odd behaviors of the current format, see item 2 of http://yong321.freeshell.org/computer/OracleIdiosyncrasies.html Yong Huang --- On Sat, 5/1/10, Howard Latham <howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm going to say it .... I think its > about time tnsnames was > restructered to make it easier to maintain. I expect Oracle > would > Advise us to use one of their tools to edit it. We all know > why that > is often impractical. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l