Oracle

The Connect using option decides how the database name is read. Fields that cannot do anything for the option you pick are hidden, so the dialog only ever shows what applies to the connection in front of you.

TNS_ALIAS and DESCRIPTOR carry their own address and protocol, so the hostname, port and Use TLS (TCPS) fields disappear for those two: there is nothing left for them to decide. The TLS credentials stay, because a tnsnames.ora entry or a descriptor can perfectly well name protocol=tcps and its certificates still have to reach the driver.

With AUTOMATIC the / and : markers still apply, so existing connections keep working untouched. Once you pick a type explicitly the marker is redundant and is stripped if you leave it in.

Tick Use TLS (TCPS) to connect over TCPS. Hop then builds the long connect descriptor, because the short host:port:sid form has nowhere to put a protocol:

The conventional TCPS port is 2484, which is used when you leave the port empty. A TNS alias and a hand written descriptor are left alone: their protocol comes from tnsnames.ora or from the descriptor itself, which is why picking either of those connection types takes the checkbox away.

AUTOMATIC is the one place where the checkbox stays on screen without being able to change the URL. When the database name holds a full descriptor — hostname and port both left empty — the protocol written into that descriptor wins, so ticking Use TLS (TCPS) still passes the credentials below to the driver but leaves the URL untouched. Picking DESCRIPTOR explicitly makes that visible, because the checkbox then disappears.

TLS credentials selects where the driver takes its certificates from:

Wallet and JKS are deliberately exclusive: the driver gives the wallet location precedence over the keystore properties, so offering both at once would let half of what you filled in be ignored silently.

Match server certificate DN is on by default and is what stops an impostor from presenting a valid certificate for some other host. Only switch it off if you know why. Fill in Server certificate DN when the certificate carries a name the driver cannot derive from the service, for example CN=db.example.com,O=Example.

All of these settings are passed to the driver as JDBC connection properties rather than being written into the URL, so they apply to every connection type and to a manually entered URL as well. An entry on the Options tab always overrides the value computed here, which is the escape hatch if you need a property Hop does not expose.

Download the wallet first: in the OCI console open your database and choose Database connection, then Download wallet. Unzip it somewhere Hop can read. Besides the wallet itself the zip holds a tnsnames.ora and a sqlnet.ora, and both are doing work in what follows.

tnsnames.ora carries one alias per service level — mydb_high, mydb_medium and mydb_low, plus mydb_tp and mydb_tpurgent on a transaction processing database. They all reach the same database and differ only in how much parallelism and how much priority a session gets, so pick by the shape of the work: _low for many small queries, _high for a few large ones.

There are two ways to connect, and the first is simpler unless you have a reason to avoid tnsnames.ora:

Either way, an Autonomous Database wallet is an auto-login (cwallet.sso) one, so the connection needs oraclepki.jar beside the driver. See the note in TLS (TCPS) connections above; hop driver install oracle takes care of it.

Oracle keeps two sets of string types. VARCHAR2, CHAR and CLOB store text in the database character set; NVARCHAR2, NCHAR and NCLOB store it in the national character set, which is where text goes that the database character set cannot represent.

The JDBC driver treats the two differently, and a value written to a national column the way a VARCHAR2 is written comes back wrong — usually as question marks or replacement characters, because the driver converted it to the database character set on the way in. Hop writes each of these columns with the JDBC call the driver expects for it, so a transform such as Table Output needs nothing configured for national text to survive the round trip.

Hop learns the column type from the prepared statement itself: the Oracle JDBC driver describes the target columns of an INSERT or UPDATE once, when the statement is first written to, so this costs one round trip per prepared statement rather than per row. A driver too old to describe its bind parameters, or a statement it cannot parse, falls back to the plain VARCHAR2 call Hop always used.