Oracle delivering graphical database development tool

Formerly known as Project Raptor, Oracle SQL Developer is a free tool featuring drag-and-drop functionality. It is intended to simplify development cycles. Although third-party graphical tools have been available for Oracle databases from companies such as Quest, all Oracle has offered was the character-based SQL*Plus tool. Now, developers will no longer need to go to third parties.

"Granted, we should have done this 10 years ago but we didn't," said Mike Hichwa, vice president of software development at Oracle.

An early user of the product concurred. "It's really first-rate. The surprise is that it took Oracle so long to come into this market," said Paul Dorsey, president of Dulcian, a consulting firm and an Oracle partner.

Since being offered in an early release format in December on the Oracle Technology Network, the tool has been downloaded 76,000 times in 130 countries, Hichwa said.

By developing its own graphical tool, Oracle can offer ease of use. "You get the Oracle database and you get the Oracle tool that comes with it," Hichwa said.

The tool develops and debugs SQL and PL/SQL code and assists developers with tasks such as object browsing and creation, running of SQL statements and scripts, editing and debugging PL/SQL code, and viewing and updating data, according to Oracle. A code formatter and code snippets are included to reduce time needed to write code.

Prebuilt reports are offered to track what is happening in the database. Developers also can build custom reports.

Oracle SQL Developer functions with all releases of Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Release 2. Oracle also plans to enable the tool to work with its TimesTen in-memory database.

With its ability to manage code and build views, the new tool currently is more geared to developers than to database administrators, Dorsey said. It needs improvements in areas such as tuning database parameters, he said.

"I think as a developer tool, it's first-rate already," Dorsey said.

This summer, the company hopes to integrate its migration workbench technology into Oracle SQL Developer so it can be used to migrate from rival databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and MySQL onto the Oracle platform.

The Java-based tool requires a Java runtime, which can either be the one included with the product or one already in use at the user site.