Better Performance with Oracle SQL Developer in Ubuntu Linux

Having switched to Ubuntu recently on my work machine I have been hooking up to our databases using Oracle's SQL Developer. One major issue that I have had is that sometimes SQL Developer would get hung while attempting to the databases. The connecting status dialog would pop up, but it would never actually connect.

It would usually be solved by restarting SQL Developer a few times, but it got to be rather annoying. I decided to devote a little time to trying to find a solution for this little annoyance and I believe I may have cured my SQL Developer connection woes by changing to the OCI/Thick JDBC Driver.

1. In SQL Developer go to Tools > Preferences to open the Preferences menu.
   
   
2. Expand the Database section and click Advanced Parameters.
   
   
3. Then check the box labeled "Use OCI/Thick driver".
   
   
4. Restart SQL Developer

Invalid Mount Options Error When Mounting External Hard Drive in Ubuntu Linux

Being a recent convert to Ubuntu Linux, I ran into a problem that others may have experienced. When I plugged in my usb external hard drive I received an Invalid Mount Options error. I found a lot of information on the forums, but nothing was working. However, I discovered that Ubuntu was basically attempting to mount my FAT32 external hard drive as a CD-ROM. In order to fix this problem you need to edit /etc/fstab and comment out the line below by putting a # at the beginning of the line:

/dev/sdb1       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

The line should look like this after the edit:

#/dev/sdb1       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

After this change, voila, the drive mounts as desired.