How to approach a “Got minus one from a read call” error when connecting to an Amazon RDS Oracle instance

The immediate cause of the problem is that the JDBC driver has attempted to read from a network Socket that has been closed by “the other end”.

This could be due to a few things:

  • If the remote server has been configured (e.g. in the “SQLNET.ora” file) to not accept connections from your IP.

  • If the JDBC url is incorrect, you could be attempting to connect to something that isn’t a database.

  • If there are too many open connections to the database service, it could refuse new connections.

Given the symptoms, I think the “too many connections” scenario is the most likely. That suggests that your application is leaking connections; i.e. creating connections and then failing to (always) close them.

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