MacLochlainns Weblog

It’s amazing the moving parts in Oracle Database 11g, and the ones that I don’t use after installation for a while often reach out to teach me something new. That’s what happened when I went to launch SQL Developer on my Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installation.

I got the message Unable to find a Java Virtual Machine, as shown in the image below. It really means unable to find a 32-bit Java 5 or Java 6 (1.6.0_4+) SDK home. Although the installation appeared fine, it pointed the SQL Developer configuration file to an incompatible 64-bit Java 7 SDK.

You fix this error by following these steps:

1. Open the sqldeveloper.conf file and check the SetJavaHome parameter value. You find the sqldeveloper.conf file in the following directory:

%ORACLE_HOME\sqldeveloper\sqldeveloper\bin

2. Install the 32-bit Java 6 (1.6.0_4+) SDK on the operating system if not installed already. You can check whether it’s installed by looking for it in the Program Files (x86) folder.
3. Change the value of the SetJavaHome parameter to point to the new 32-bit Java 6 home directory (or folder). The following change to line 18 in the sqldeveloper.conf file should fix it on your installation (provided that’s your version of the JVM).

18

SetJavaHome C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_34

Hope this helps those who run into the same issue.