SQL Developer

Oracle have given birth to SQL Developer 4.0 today, as announced by Jeff Smith.

SQL Developer 4 EA2 includes a performance node in the DBA tree.

You can use this to view ADDM, AWR and ASH reports directly from SQL Developer. I know I can get these from Cloud Control, but previously I tended to pull these out from the command line on the server. This is a much better approach IMHO.

I wrote a blog post some time ago about using SQL Developer 3.x to connect to SQL Server. I tried the same thing today from SQL Developer 4 EA2 and it works just fine.

You have to download the 3rd party JDBC driver and point SQL Developer to it. You can read how to do it here.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: My colleague just told me this.

“If you at any point decide to use Windows authentication to connect (like I just did), you might hit this error:

Status : Failure -I/O Error: SSO Failed: Native SSPI library not loaded. Check the java.library.path system property.

[This post was originally published on 2012/02/29 and was hidden shortly thereafter. I'm un-hiding it as of 2012/05/30 with some minor edits.]

Many Oracle Database users like tools with GUI interfaces because they add features and functionality that are not easily available from the command line interfaces like SQL*Plus. One of the more popular tools from my experiences is Oracle SQL Developer in part because it’s a free tool from Oracle. Given SQL Developer’s current design (as of version 3.1.07.42), some issues frequently show up when using it with Oracle Databases with Parallel Execution. SQL Developer also contains a bug that exacerbates this issue as well.

I had a play around with the scheduler support in SQL Developer 3.1 today. I’m late to the party because most of it has been there since 3.0, but what the hell.

• SQL Developer 3.1 Scheduler (DBMS_SCHEDULER) Support

It’s more of an opinion piece, so it started as a blog post, but it got too big. Not really what I usually put on the website, but I figured if I put it on the blog it would get in the way of the movie and book reviews and that simply wouldn’t do…

I am still worried about feature creep turning SQL Developer into the new TOAD, but so far so good. I’m liking it more and more with each release.

Cheers

Tim…

One of the things that sounded kinda neat in SQL Developer 3.1 was the Data Pump Wizards, so I thought I would have a play with them.

• SQL Developer 3.1 Data Pump Wizards (expdp, impdp)

As you would expect, they are pretty straight forward. They can’t do everything you can do with expdp and impdp, but they are pretty cool for on-the-fly tasks.

You can use the wizard to generate data pump definitions using the PL/SQL API. It would have been a nice touch if it gave you the option to see a regular command line or parameter file definition also, since I would be more likely to put that into source control than the API definition of a job. Even so, a nice little feature.

Cheers

Tim…

Currently at Tom Kyte’s session regarding topics new, improved or coming in Oracle Application Development. Tom told about the history APEX has gone thru and the current setup with the APEX Listener and even the “PL/SQL Gateway” was mentioned. I always have to laugh a bit because this last one touches the XDB Protocol Server …

Continue reading »

This afternoon I’ve been cleaning up some data in an SQL Server database. I decided to use SQL*Developer to connect to SQL Server by following this post.

• Using Oracle SQLDeveloper to access SQLServer (The “Check for Updates” functionality doesn’t seem to work properly on my SQL*Developer running on CentOS 5 (64-bit), so I had to install the JDBC driver manually.)

I made liberal use of the following tip when dealing with TEXT and NTEXT types.

• How to use REPLACE() within NTEXT columns in SQL Server

The joys of dealing with multiple engines…

Cheers

Tim…