What's the best type 4 Oracle JDBC driver?

Question

What's the best type 4 Oracle JDBC driver?

What I want:

• Stable, few bugs and quick fixes
• Should warn about the usual JDBC pitfalls (connection leaks, etc)
• Must support CLOB

[EDIT] My main issues with the "free" Oracle Type 4 driver are:

• I spent two weeks hunting down a cursor leak in the CLOB support code (closing the stream would not close the underlying cursor)
• When you fetch values from a ResultSet, you must process them in order (so you can't get column #3 anymore after fetching column #4)
• getMetaData() on a result set doesn't work until after fetching the first row.
• There were many other bugs and deficiencies but I don't remember them anymore.

So all in all, a driver which costs me $1,000 per seat is more "cheap" than the "free" one from Oracle. The only good thing about the driver was that I didn't have to put databases into TNSNAMES and that I could use a single driver to access Oracle 8, 9 and 10. That's why I ask.

Answer 1

Oracle's type 4 JDBC driver is pretty good. Obviously, as with any software, there are bugs, but they're generally not bad. And the price (free) can't be beat.

If you are looking for third-party commercial drivers, I have always had good experiences with DataDirect products in this realm. I wouldn't normally bother licensing a type 4 JDBC driver, but if you have particularly high end requirements, it may be worthwhile.