Installing & Setting up SQL Developer 4

The EA1 (early adopter) release of SQL Developer is now available. The main reason that I’m interested in this tools is that it has the upgraded Oracle Data Mining workflow tool. I’ve been using SQL Developer for a long, long time.  I was lucky enough to see a demo of it before it was ever released, back ……(well a long, long time ago) when Barry McGillin gave a demo of what they called Project Raptor, to a small group of (12) Oracle users in the Oracle East Point office, Dublin, Ireland. Barry was one of a couple of developers who were developing Project Raptor.
The EA1 release of SQL Developer 4 comes without the JDK install. For SQL Developer 4 you will need to install JDK 1.7.  There is a link from the SQL Developer 4 download page.

After installing JDK 1.7 or maybe you have it installed already, you are ready to setup SQL Developer 4. The following instructions are for installing SQL Developer 4 on Windows.
After downloading it from the download page, all you have to do is to unzip the download. There is no install program. You are almost ready to start using SQL Developer.
There are 2 types of setup for SQL Developer. The first is where you have not used SQL Developer before. Point 1 below shows what is involved with this scenario.  Point 2 below shows what is involved if you have used previous releases of SQL Developer.
0.   Common steps to installing and setting up SQL Developer

• Unzip the SQL Developer 4 download file to a location where you want the software to be located.
• Go down the directories to where the sqldeveloper.exe is located.
• Create a shortcut on your desktop for this file.
• Double click on the shortcut on your desktop
• Enter the location where JDK 1.7 was installed
  • C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_25
• SQL Developer will start

1.   Scenario: Env. that has not used SQL Dev before

• You will be asked about Importing Preferences from a previous SQL Developer installation. As you don’t have any in this scenario, only the No button will be clickable. The setup of SQL Developer will complete and will open.
• Creating a connect to a 12c pluggable database. In a previous blog post I installed 12c on a Windows 7 64 bit Virtualbox VM. The pluggable DB created was called pdb12c and a schema called brendan.
• To create a connection to this schema. Click on the green + icon under the connections tab. The New/Select Database Connection window will open. Enter the usual details, but set the Service Name to pdh12c instead of using of using a SID. Click the Test button and you should see the Status: Success message

• Double click on the connection to open the SQL Worksheet
• Finally enjoy 12c

2. Scenario: Previous releases of SQL Developer exist

• When asked about importing preferences from your previous SQL Developer installation, say Yes. This will take the connections from the most recent version of SQL Developer that you have installed. If you want to change this click on the button and select the version from the list
• The install will progress updating everything and pull in your connects.
• When finished SQL Developer 4 will open
• But before you get going you should test that your connections work. An easy way of doing this is to use the pingall command. Open a SQL worksheet, connect to one of your schemas (this will test that your connection works), type pingall and press F5. This will test all of your connections and tell you which ones are currently working and which connections are not (you will see a –1ms).
• You can now enjoy SQL Developer 4.

During the install of SQL Developer 4 I had an error. After inserting the directory for Java, the progress bar of the loading window got to about 1cm, displaying Registering Extensions above it, and then the loading window closed. SQL Dev 4 did not open.  After various attempts at investigating the problem, it looks like the directory created in AppData (Windows 7) was corrupted in some way. The solution to this problem is to rename or remove the directory.
\AppData\Roaming\SQL Developer\system4.0.0.12.27
When you have renamed or removed this directory, try starting SQL Dev 4 again. Everything should work now. Well it did for me.
Many thanks to Turloch in Oracle for his help.