Hetrogenious services

Great for getting Oracle to talk to other databases (via ODBC) as if the other database was just another Oracle remote database. i.e. Through a db link

see
http://www.acs.ilstu.edu/docs/Oracle/server.101/b10764/tgvsgc.htm
and
http://www.dbasupport.com/oracle/ora10g/connection01.shtml

Straight forward to set up, at least for SQL Server. I had no luck however, getting it to talk to Timesten (thro the odbc), which was a shame. It did prove to be a bit flaky under Windows as the hsodbc.exe would hang around long after the query to the remote database had been chopped. The tnslistener process would not restart until after this process had been killed. I needed to do regular restarts of the tnslistener process. Not something I'd want to use in a production environment but OK for one off data extractions.