I just noticed that (finally) in 11.2 this syntax is supported:

SQL> CREATE DATABASE LINK demo_x2 2 CONNECT TO tanel IDENTIFIED BY password 3 USING 'exadb03:1521/DEMO'; Database link created.

This just makes life a bit easier as there’s no need to use the long TNS format entry (or a tnsnames.ora/LDAP alias). It might work in 11.1 too (haven’t tested) but it didn’t work on 10.2.0.4 …

Update: This feature works for dblinks in 10.2 onwards – when I tested it on my 10.2, I got an error initially, but it was because the hostname I used didn’t resolve to an IP. Thanks to Randolf Geist for pointing this out.

In case you didn’t know, the sqlplus supports such an easy connect method since 10g:

tanel@mac02:~$ sqlplus tanel/password@exadb03/DEMO SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Mon Mar 5 09:51:27 2012 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All Rights Reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL>

If you omit the port from the syntax, it defaults to 1521.