A few days ago I had a strange problem with an Oracle database together with the current 1.7 version o fOpen JDK. The problems occurred on a Jenkins build slave running on CentOS 6.6. The connection to the Oracle database was done with Oracle’s JDBC driver. The script doing the database stuff runs without error. But not every time. So I got the error message „failing randomly“. Failing randomly, what the heck … I started to create a small shell script which executes the script in question several times. The first run of the script always succeeds. The second run needs a lot more time to connect to the database…