The Soulpass Project

If you’ve worked with MySQL, you’ve probably worked with phpMyAdmin. If you’ve dug around for other tools, you may have worked with the MySQL Query Browser or even MySQL Administrator. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say if you have, you probably haven’t wanted to go back to CLI. These tools are all high-quality and free, and that certainly adds to their appeal.

So what is an Oracle administrator to do?

SQL Developer. I’m fairly confident that there are no remotely comparable tools available for free. It uses the JAVA VM and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It turns a mess like this…

CREATE TABLE employees_demo
    ( employee_id    NUMBER(6)
    , first_name     VARCHAR2(20)
    , last_name      VARCHAR2(25)
         CONSTRAINT emp_last_name_nn_demo NOT NULL
    , email          VARCHAR2(25)
         CONSTRAINT emp_email_nn_demo     NOT NULL
    , phone_number   VARCHAR2(20)
    , hire_date      DATE  DEFAULT SYSDATE
         CONSTRAINT emp_hire_date_nn_demo  NOT NULL
    , job_id         VARCHAR2(10)
       CONSTRAINT     emp_job_nn_demo  NOT NULL
    , salary         NUMBER(8,2)
       CONSTRAINT     emp_salary_nn_demo  NOT NULL
    , commission_pct NUMBER(2,2)
    , manager_id     NUMBER(6)
    , department_id  NUMBER(4)
    , dn             VARCHAR2(300)
    , CONSTRAINT     emp_salary_min_demo
                     CHECK (salary > 0)
    , CONSTRAINT     emp_email_uk_demo
                     UNIQUE (email)
    )
   TABLESPACE example
   STORAGE (INITIAL     6144
            NEXT        6144
            MINEXTENTS     1
            MAXEXTENTS     5 );

…into a few clicks and column naming. It visualizes pretty much every aspect of your databases without having to worry about endless CLI commands. It’s got a SQL editor so you can test your statements before implementing them in your applications. Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under Database. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.