NetBeans has the capability to view databases directly; since I haven’t had so much luck getting Oracle’s sqldeveloper running in linux, I thought I’d try this instead. Seems to work great, now that I’ve got it configured.
I was working from the directions here: http://xaop.com/blog/2007/12/15/how-to-browse-oracle-databases-from-within-netbeans/
I actually ended up using Oracle Thin (OCI8 with Service ID (SID)) with this jdbc url in this format: jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:port:dbname
Once I entered my username and password, NetBeans prompted me to select the schema, and I was connected and able to browse and query the data in my Emory Shared Data views.