No Place Like Home

After having installed the new Oracle 11g client, I wanted to put PL/SQL Developer on my machine. Ooops. I forgot that my PL/SQL Developer required a bunch of passwords for installation. I dug up my printout with all those passwords. Once I installed PL/SQL Developer, I launched it hoping to execute some queries. No luck. It kept complaining that SQL*Net was not installed.

This seemed vaguely familiar. I googled this problem. Some people recommended that I hack up the Oracle entries in the Windows registry. That did not seem too encouraging. Instead I tried applying some settings in the PL/SQL Preferences tab. I hard coded the Oracle Home directory in there. Still no help.

Finally I did some more googling on the problem. Someone smart advised me to put in the full path for the OCI Library. Bamm. That did the trick. I am recording my experience here so I can come back the next time I install PL/SQL Developer and maybe a new Oracle client.