alternative for a virtual oracle data layer in mapserver?

So you have got some non-spatial data in oracle, but containing simple xy attributes and want to map it using mapserver (event theme)? Don't start defining a virtual data layer using ogr (especially difficult if you have to compile it with unixodbc). Just define a (materialized) view in Oracle 9i in which you convert the x-y attributes to a spatial-field, and add the view as a normal oracle layer:

select
MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY(
2001,
900211,
MDSYS.SDO_POINT_TYPE(st.x, st.y, NULL),
NULL,
NULL) as geom
from world.data st

good luck!

By the way mapserver 4.4.2 has arrived (i hope they fixed some mis-configurations in the precomiled win32 binaries with oracle support)