Use tnsnames ora in Oracle SQL Developer

Question

I am evaluating Oracle SQL Developer   My tnsnames ora is populated  and a tnsping to a connection defined in tnsnames ora works fine  Still  SQL Developer does not display any connections   Oracle SQL Developer Soars  mentions  that if     you have Oracle client software and a tnsnames ora file already installed on your machine  Oracle SQL Developer will automatically populate the Connections navigator from the net service names defined in tnsnames ora    I also tried to set my TNS ADMIN environment variable  but after restarting SQL Developer there are still no connections displayed   Any ideas  Anyone successfully working with SQL Developer and tnsnames ora

User · Answer

This excellent answer to a similar question (that I could not find before, unfortunately) helped me solve the problem.

Copying Content from referenced answer :

SQL Developer will look in the following location in this order for a tnsnames.ora file

$HOME/.tnsnames.ora
$TNS_ADMIN/tnsnames.ora
TNS_ADMIN lookup key in the registry
/etc/tnsnames.ora ( non-windows )
$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora
LocalMachine\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\ORACLE_HOME_KEY
LocalMachine\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\ORACLE_HOME

If your tnsnames.ora file is not getting recognized, use the following procedure:

Define an environmental variable called TNS_ADMIN to point to the folder that contains your tnsnames.ora file.

In Windows, this is done by navigating to Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Environment Variables...
In Linux, define the TNS_ADMIN variable in the .profile file in your home directory.

Confirm the os is recognizing this environmental variable

From the Windows command line: echo %TNS_ADMIN%

From linux: echo $TNS_ADMIN

Restart SQL Developer Now in SQL Developer right click on Connections and select New Connection.... Select TNS as connection type in the drop down box. Your entries from tnsnames.ora should now display here.

User · Answer

In SQLDeveloper browse Tools -- gt  Preferences  as shown in below image   In the Preferences options expand Database -- gt  select Advanced -- gt  under  Tnsnames Directory  -- gt  Browse the directory where tnsnames ora present  Then click on Ok  as shown in below diagram  tnsnames ora available at Drive  oracle product 10x x x client x NETWORK ADMIN       Now you can connect via the TNSnames options

User · Answer

I had the same problem  tnsnames ora worked fine for all other tools but SQL Developer would not use it  I tried all the suggestions on the web I could find  including the solutions on the link provided here  Nothing worked   It turns out that the database was caching backup copies of tnsnames ora like tnsnames ora bk2  tnsnames09042811AM4501 bak  tnsnames ora bk etc  These files were not readable by the average user   I suspect sqldeveloper is pattern matching for the name and it was trying to read one of these backup copies and couldn t  So it just fails gracefully and shows nothing in drop down list   The solution is to make all the files readable or delete or move the backup copies out of the Admin directory

User · Answer

On the newer versions of macOS  one also has to set java library path  The easiest safest way to do that  1  is by creating    sqldeveloper  lt version gt  sqldeveloper conf file and populating it as such   AddVMOption -Djava library path  lt instant client directory gt     1  https   community oracle com message 14132189 14132189

User · Answer

This helped me   Posted  8 12 2011 4 54  Set tnsnames directory tools- Preferences- Database- advanced- Tnsnames Directory  https   forums oracle com forums thread jspa messageID 10020012 amp  10020012

[sql] Use tnsnames.ora in Oracle SQL Developer

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