I think this would be good to look at for 1.2
What is happening is that under oracle in development mode you get a new connection on every request, without old connections being closed/disconnected.
So in my shop after about 200 requests I am blocking all new
connections for anything
using this oracle instance. Not a great selling point for my efforts
to evangalize rails to
my fellow devs using this db... 
I made the changes in the patch in my vendor/rails and it solved my problem.
tom