I stumbled accross this when I tried to connect to a "normal" Oracle 11g instance (no Oracle Spatial) in order to join Oracle tables to spatial data in other formats. Note that this is not about tables without geometry in an Oracle Spatial db (same issue with PostgreSQL db without PostGIS extension).
A related issue has already been addressed and answered in this question: Adding non-spatial Oracle table to QGIS
Unfortunately, the answer to the above question does not work for me, because the scan does not find MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY object.
I think that it is a common task to join non-spatial data from non-spatially enabled databases with spatial data of any source, so is there a way to access "normal" Oracle db (rsp. PostgreSQL or any other databases) without spatial extension or is this generally impossible from QGIS?