Can't connect using OCI JDBC driver in OC4J 10.1.3.3 standalone

Question

Hi all,
I've recently upgraded my JDev from 10.1.3.2 to 10.1.3.3 and now I'm unable to establish any OCI connections with my local Oracle 10.1.0.4 database. Not even through a connection pool. The strangest thing is that when I test an OCI connection running from JDeveloper it works fine and the JDBC jars and the oci client are exactly the same.
The error is always the same when I execute a test on a connection pool using the OCI driver:
WARNING J2EE DS-00001 Exception occurred testing connection. Exception: java.sql.SQLException: Closed Connection.
If I just change the driver to the THIN one, the same test works. If I take the same URL from the OCI test and use it in a test class and run it inside JDeveloper, it works also.
I've even downloaded the instant client 10.1.0.5 (which happens to be exactly the same version of the JDBC driver that comes with JDev 10.1.3.3) and tried to use it with no success.
THIN connections are working just fine. The problem happens only when I try to connect via OCI and this problem was not happening in version 10.1.3.2.
Any help?

Answer 1

I found the cause of this problem. It turns out that you must be very careful with the environment variable ORACLE_HOME. On Windows, normally, we don't even set this variable because most applications are able to get it from the system's registry.
Well, it happened that I've edited the script start_oc4j.bat and, for organization reasons, I set the ORACLE_HOME variable with my JDeveloper's home directory (which is the same as my OC4J standalone's). By doing that, I kind of confused the OCI client. Once I removed the "set ORACLE_HOME=C:\JDev" line from the script, everything worked just fine again.
So, always remember: avoid setting environment variable ORACLE_HOME when using Windows and, if you must set it, be sure to do it right.
Regards,
Eduardo.