Verifying Oracle connection in a Pro*C program

I am fairly new to Pro*C and PL/SQL, so please excuse any ignorance.

I was wondering if anybody knew a method to verify that you have connection to Oracle before trying a lookup/update in a Pro*C application.

Here's my situation:

I have a two machine setup, one is the database, the other is where the apps are run from. Recently, someone (accidentally) disconnected the database machine from the network. The next time my application tried to do a lookup in the database, it hung and I had to restart the app after the database machine was reconnected. I have looked at all the documentation that I can find, but I have not found anything describing a method to check for this.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Karl Gruel
kgruel_at_paradigm4.com