How can I keep my DB connection from failing when the network is unstable?

Question

We have a application that uses BDE connected to an Oracle DB.
I use TQuery for the SQL queries, and it connects to TDatabase, we are not professional programmers, and we do

Answer 1

Try to implement a "watchdog" thread that :

1. Pings the network (IP address of the database server) every X seconds
2. If unavailable then disables the UI and try to connect again

Take into account that any transaction might not succeed at all, and save that information somewhere. Then, upon connecting via "watchdog" thread, try to preform that transaction again, if the nature of transaction allows so.