Connection Problems

Sometime ago in July 1994 there was a discussion of Oracle connection problems (e.g., reconnecting after you lose a connection, etc.). I was wondering whether someone could repost the solution(s) to those problems.

The problem that I am running into is this: When my application has lost an Oracle connection, it gets potentially different error codes/messages
(e.g., 3114 is the 'no longer connected' error
[one could get this whenever the system's idling threshold has been exceeded], 6110 is a tcp/ip two ask problem, etc...). Ideally, I'd like my application's error handler to be able to reconnect a user automatically whenever possible. Even more ideally, I'd like to be able to detect a lost connection problem BEFORE my application needs to execute another query.

My questions are:
(1) Are there functions that I can call to detect a lost
connection problem before my application needs to execute another query? I was told there's no such functions and that the only way my application would know that there's a lost connection problem is when it executes a query.

(2) If the answer to (1) is really no, then could someone
please advise me on when it might be ok to try reconnecting after a lost connection problem? For example, can one always recover from a 3114 error?

(3) has anybody else had to solve these kinds of problems?
If so, would you be kind enough to share your knowledge and experiences? (We're building a Parcplace VisualWorks environment n using Parcplace's Oracle 7 driver in an HP Unix Server environment).

Any help and responses would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Received on Tue Oct 18 1994 - 15:49:41 CET