missing alias of tnsnames.ora
today i discovered a problem with my tnsnames.ora file.
With my free old Toad, there is no way to define the "name" of the connection. I only have the network alias and the user. So i used alias names like customer-project(PRODUCTION) and customer-project(DEVELOPMENT) for old oracle 8i connections, where i can not use SQLDeveloper. What a bad idea...
Tnsping and SQL*Plus work fine, Toad works fine, but SQLDeveloper has a problem. Many (random?) network aliases are missing.
In the future i will avoid special characters in my network aliases, but its intersting to know that the common way to use tnsping to test tnsnames.ora will not be significant in combination with SQLDeveloper.