I work fast, most often across several database at once, multitasking across projects. Recently with one client I noticed SQL Developer dropping connections, repeatedly, but only on certain database connections. Most often I would need to reconnect upon opening a table or view, package, trigger, almost any object from the navigator. After successfully compiling something, need to reconnect. After creating a trigger, reconnect. Forget about an After-Update trigger – that visibly disconnected me – so I got in the habit of creating things outside of SQL Dev.  Wait a minute..that’s just wrong. I knew this had to be something easy to fix.

That’s when I started looking … After a bit of research I found this link :

Brendan Tierney – Oralytics Blog: SQL Developer is dropping connections

which explained my problem – and offered a solution:

The solution (since that’s what you care about):

Add this line:

AddVMOption -Doracle.net.disableOob=true

to the sqldeveloper.conf file.

I actually added mine to the sqldeveloper_nodebug.conf file.

For SQL Developer 4.1, for my install on Windows 7, this falls in the …\sqldeveloper\bin\ directory for the SQL Developer install directory.

The problem (the short version):

The theory is that this is being caused by and Out of Bands (OOB) error in the jdbc driver or on the network.  Whatever the error, jdbc driver or network, the constant need to reconnect was rendering SQL Developer almost useless for those connections for which this occurred.   It is not doing that any more – Yeah!

I do expect that this option will block times when SQL Dev should disconnect – so I am paying attention and watching for side effects.  So far, so good.  Hope this helps someone else,

Karen