A few days back I happened to read an article published in Oracle magazine named as “Power of the Two”. The power being mentioned was of Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Application Express together. I have already talked about the SQL Developer on the same blog but that post made me to rethink my previous decision to not to use Oracle SQL Developer. For the practice of the mentioned article I downloaded the latest release of the tool that runs with JDK. By the way I am playing and trying to learn more and more about Oracle APEX these days and this was one of the reasons why I opt to explore SQL Developer again.
As a query development tool I feel a great deal of comfort with PL/SQL Developer from “allroundautomations”. I found a few new features in this release of SQL Developer including the topic about which I was reading the article about in first place, the integration of Oracle APEX objects with SQL Developer. The other feature I liked was Database copy which allows moving schemas from one database to the other without export, import traditional approach. You can also generate a script of the entire schema via Database Export feature. Also some interface changes were good enough to make my mind of using it along side PL/SQL Developer. Especially browsing of database objects was really good and easy.
Despite from all this I think the only drawback which can be good enough to quit using this tool is that it is build using Java (as much as I understood). It is horribly heavy. If you minimize it then it will take about 5 to 10 minutes to get back normal at least on my machine that has fairly good hardware support including 1.5GB RAM. This one problem makes the use and the entire array of features that Oracle proclaims about it totally useless, at least for me if not for anybody else.
