SQL Developer

Hello,

We're a enterprise software development shop running OS X on our developer machines. We're struggling to find a decent tool to interact with Oracle databases. To me, SQLDeveloper works quite well on Windows, but has some serious stability issues on Mac.

I therefore assume that we're doing something wrong on the setup side of things. :)

The most severe stability issue relates to what happens when our network connection drops. Basically, SQLDeveloper ends up hanging (completely unresponsive to any inputs for an indefinite period of time) when we try to do anything other than "Disconnect" a connection that has been dropped on the network side. If we know the connection has been interrupted we can "Disconnect", "Connect", "Disconnect", and finally "Connect" and we won't get error messages.

If we do anything on a "dead but SQLDeveloper thinks open" connection, it hangs badly. So badly, in fact, that it does not respond to "Force Quit" let alone a "Quit". I let the hang try to resolve itself over a weekend, no dice. The only way to get SQLDeveloper back is to "kill -9" the three processes.

To be honest, this scenario isn't exactly pretty on Windows (still need to do the Disconnect/Connect/Disconnect/Connect malarkey), but at least I retain some amount of control (as in, the app is not frozen). It almost seems like we're configured to have an infinite timeout in conjunction with a blocking call across the network...

I've subsequently tried to change to JDK 1.6 in the vain hope that will solve the problems, but can't for the life of me work out how to do this. I've tried all sorts of things, but it keeps pulling from /usr/bin/java (which links to JDK 1.5.0). I can't find docs that help me...I've tried (using /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home ; this is 1.6.0_07):
* Setting OIDE_JAVA_HOME in my environment
* adding a line to ide/bin/jdk.conf: "SetJavaHome /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home"
* Adding the same line to sqldeveloper/bin/jdk.conf
* Creating a file ~/.sqldeveloper_jdk and putting "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home" in that file

Any ideas? My first and foremost concern is obviously the connection thing...JDK 1.6 was merely a way to try to correct this stability problem...