Oracle SQL Developer Reviews

They've done so many things that have made that product just so great. The most valuable features, what I tend to now use the most, outside of the change they've made in the IDE itself, are how it's become more flexible and the maturity in the IDE itself. It has the ability to manipulate code right there on the screen. The formatting and the UI's getting a whole lot better. That's part of it.

As far as a specific valuable feature, outside of just mentioning how it seemed the tool itself matured overall, is its modularity. I'm now able to split out windows that I couldn't do before. Basically, exploiting Windows features that are now available, it lets me kind of take advantage of having a really huge 30” screen. Now I can pull up and have multiple views of code running, and I'm able to lock that code, lock the results of queries in, so that I can see the differences between the things that I'm doing and if I wanted to change something, what the outputs will be. That's been a really good feature that I've appreciated in SQL Developer.

When I was reviewing some things in SQL Developer, one of the things that jumped out at me, especially in a former job a couple years ago, was the Cart feature. It allowed you to really streamline processes. Our process before was my developers would create some type of PL/SQL script, it could include DDL, a creating table, grants/permissions, obviously the scripting behind that, and we would take those series of files, we would put them on a shared drive on our network where our DBAs could then go get those files, and then promote them into our production environment.

The Cart feature, which came out I think around version 4 or so of SQL Developer, allowed you in the tool itself to select all of those components that developers had been working on, patch them up into a file that included everything our DBAs would need in order to roll that onto production. We can then just send them basically this shopping cart. They could take SQL Developer on the back end, open that cart up and basically deploy that through whatever environment.

That really allowed us to make sure that all the files and all of the components of any particular project we were working on were together, because we're not trying to copy this SQL file and put it over here, and this database definition, this table definition file in SQL over here, and grab a bunch of different things and stick them in a shared drive. We were able to use the tool itself, SQL Developer, to do that packaging for us and then with all the surrounding code needed to actually deploy that, and just pass that off to our DBAs who can then just execute that series of commands. They didn't have to come back and ask us anything. We eliminated kind of the question-answer piece between what the developer wanted and what the DBA was trying to do, because we were able now to encapsulate all of that into this Cart file. The Cart file included all of the coding that we needed our DBAs to execute on, to deploy into our development production environment space, to put our changes in. It really streamlined a process that we had integrated.

• The code editor
• The tree view
• The debugger
• The support available for the product

Because I work in higher education, and budget dollars are always limited, the fact that this product is delivered at no cost to us as Oracle users is phenomenal. Only a small fraction of our in-house staff are using another solution to write code that affects our student information system (SIS). IT staff supporting the SIS could not do our jobs without SQL Developer.

I usually use SQL Developer for tuning and analyzing databases, to visualise results, create simple reports and to simplify work by using simple scripts. 

It makes life easier because I don't need to install something onsite when I am with a customer. And, since it's free, it helps me to unify and streamline my approach over multiple projects so I don't have to have a different approach for different customers.

The new version 18 is really helpful, with a more flexible GUI and more reliable connectors.

I would say the number one feature is it’s easy to use functionality. It is an extremely simple product and the UI is user-friendly.

We use it for JD Edwards to SQL the queries on the SQL database side, so it gives us the results fast. In this way, we are able to help the business.

The process is that once we run it to get the results, we can optimize it and send them out to the business users.

I've actually been using a similar tool for probably 17 years, but we switched over about four years ago to SQL Developer. A lot of these features I had used previously but there are advantages to SQL Developer. I guess just cleaning the database, looking at the information about your objects and the database, doing data manipulation. That's what I use it most for. DBAs would use it a little differently, maybe, but for me, as more of a developer or business analyst, it's pretty simple, just kind of your gateway to the database.

The biggest thing is really the cost savings as opposed to using a competitor project or competitor application to SQL Developer. The competitors cost significantly more.

Since Oracle SQL Developer is free, we no longer incurred the cost of the previous tool. There was also benefit to our organization in that the SQL Developer community is very active and growing, so there is a lot of resources available to us.

To me, the most valuable feature is the ability to quickly reverse engineer a database structure into a data model.

There's also a drag-and-drop feature that helps you build queries in SQL Developer, which has a visual query builder with it. I like that feature a lot as it has a number of options in the wizard to pick what type of query you're trying to build. It can build inserts and updates as well. I've used that quite a bit as well. That was very helpful for, I'll say, short-cutting the process of building queries. It helps me be agile.

Where clients of mine have adopted using the data modeler in particular, the teams are able to become more efficient because they have the data model to use as a reference diagram and documentation to the structure of the database. That made planning changes to the database, reports and things like that much easier to do, and less error prone. Whereas before, when they didn't have a model and they were having to guess at what the data structures were and do a lot of individual investigations. It took a lot longer to get things done.

It also allowed us to produce a data dictionary for the organization, which helped business users. I deal primarily in data warehousing and so from a business intelligence perspective, being able to publish a data dictionary to the business users was very helpful because it helped them understand the database that they're trying to pull the data from.

One of the goals of the tool is to allow the user to complete tasks with the least number of steps. For example, to load an Excel spreadsheet into a table, you just have to complete a simple, four-step wizard and all the data will be in your table.

Another example is having quick access to queries you executed some time ago without having to manually save them. That way, you can still access an important or frequently used query that maybe you forgot to save.

Generating data files from queries with minimum setup is a time saver. You can preset the output format you want (CSV, insert, Excel, JSON to name a few), run your query and the file will be generated in that format.

We use it daily to merge our databases. In my function, I use it as my client database.

I am also using a newer version. It is small client, which is new product. We use the GUI product daily. This is my daily tool for whatever I am doing. 

• It is very easy to use. 
• I have a lot of flexibility with it. 
• For DBA tasks, it is also very good.