Oracle SQL Developer tips

The Oracle SQL Developer tool (formerly project Raptor) is a GUI-based tool to aid in database browsing and report development.  The Oracle SQL Developer tool can be downloaded here.

Jon Emmons of the popular "Life after coffee" blog, notes the latest features of Oracle SQL Developer:

It remains to se seen how much Oracle SQL Developer will impact the longstanding fan base for TOAD, a similar GUI for Oracle developers, but the fact that Oracle SQL Developer is free, and because Oracle SQL Developer is released by Oracle, the uptake is sure to carry some weight.  Oracle SQL Developer is also platform independent.

As a practical matter for experienced Oracle professionals who traditionally shun GUI tools in favor of custom scripts, the Oracle SQL Developer tool will join Oracle enterprise manager as a GUI tool to help those who cannot remember the syntax of cryptic Oracle commands.

For many years there was no lasting standard graphical user interface tool for working with Oracle databases. At one point, Oracle introduced Procedure Builder, a great little tool for PL/SQL developers, but it went away.

Then Oracle on Windows offered Database Manager  , a little lightweight OEM-like utility for managing databases, and it too disappeared. As for Oracle Enterprise Manager  , it started out as a fat-Java client tool, but then became a web-based application. In addition, Application Express (APEX ) is very useful for APEX work, but it is not suitable as a general-purpose Oracle database tool. Therefore, many people relied on tools like Toad ® for years as a decent GUI for general purpose Oracle work.
 
Fortunately, Oracle finally saw the need for such a tool and built a very good freeware offering called SQL Developer . SQL Developer can be downloaded from their website as a standalone freeware offering and, starting with Oracle 11g, it is now part of the standard Oracle client install. Figure 5.3 shows what SQL Developer looks like.

There are far too many features in SQL Developer to do it justice in just a brief section of one chapter of a book. Nevertheless, there are numerous blogs, discussion forums and even entire books now on the product, so search the web for information and the latest details. Note that as a Java based application, SQL Developer runs on numerous platforms and not just Microsoft Windows.

So for UNIX, LINUX and even MAC-OS users, SQL Developer may well be the tool of choice.  It is good to observe that while SQL Developer does increasingly support SQL*Plus command syntax, it is not an entire replacement for it.

Here are my related notes on using Oracle SQL Developer: