Will Oracle 9i OCI driver work with an Oracle 10g server?

Question

I'm in charge of a Perl application that uses DBD::Oracle compiled against a 9.2.0.8 OCI client. This is on a sun4u box, albeit with 32-bit binaries. DBD::Oracle is linked against 32-bit OCI libs. We're currently running against a 9i server.

Our DBA team is planning to upgrade the server to 10g, namely 10.2.0.4. I'm faced with two options:

1. Continue using 9i drivers against the new 10g server.
2. OR, upgrade our client from 9.2.0.8 to 10.2.0.4 to match the server's version.

For various operational reasons, I'd prefer to go with (1) above. However, I am not sure whether a 9i OCI client can work with a 10g Oracle server. Can this be done?

Answer 1

Yes, it should work. Although, as you might already know, you won't have access to 10g client specific features...

Answer 2

I believe an Oracle 9i driver will work with both 10g and 11g (I know for a fact the Java ones do).

However, your best bet would be to set up a test server/VM with Oracle 10g on it, and test it.