Connecting to the Oracle cloud using SQLDeveloper is easy. You just download the wallet to your machine and tell SQLDeveloper to use the contents of this zip file for your connection. Ofcourse this is easy, because SQLDeveloper is an Oracle product, it would be bad advertising if this was a hard thing to do.

Connecting PL/SQL Developer to the Oracle cloud takes a bit more work, but is isn’t hard, if you know what to do. I didn’t get it to work for a long time but thanks to Connor McDonald I learned the steps to take. It took me too long to write a blog post about this, but here it finally is.

First of all, you need to download the wallet containing all the connection information. To this connect to your Cloud database and click on the DB Connection button.

Here you can choose which type of wallet you want to download. In this case choose the instance wallet and click Download wallet.

After you provide a password you can download the wallet in a Zip file.

Save this file to you machine.
After you have downloaded the zip file you must unpack it. Remember the location you unzipped it to, because you will need this later.

Open the SQLNET.ORA file from the wallet, so you can copy it to paste into your own SQLNET.ORA.
In your own sqlnet.ora add these lines and edit the directory:

#Added for cloud access
WALLET_LOCATION = (SOURCE = (METHOD = file) (METHOD_DATA = (DIRECTORY="D:\MyStack\MyCloud\Wallet_Patch72Sandbox")))
SSL_SERVER_DN_MATCH=yes

The directory should point to the location where you unpacked the wallet.
Now open up the TNSNAMES.ORA file, copy the contents and paste them into your own TNSNAMES.ORA file.

#Cloud
patch72sandbox_high = (description= ...)

patch72sandbox_low = (description= ...)

patch72sandbox_medium = (description= ...)

patch72sandbox_tp = (description= ...)

patch72sandbox_tpurgent = (description= ...)

After these steps you should be able to connect PL/SQL Developer to your Oracle cloud instance.

Hope this helps. At least is will help me to remember this 😉