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Re: PL/SQL Development Tool Of Choice

From: William Robertson <william_at_williamrobertson.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:28:17 +0100
Message-ID: <5007B711.1050905_at_williamrobertson.net> 



 


Agreed. I'm all for IDEs and feature-rich products in general - Joel Spolsky
has written somewhere about how we can be too quick to call something
'bloatware' just because it has features we don't personally need (I would
even defend MS Word here) - but seriously, in TOAD you can't change the
editor font without first selecting the language from a list that includes
Assembler.


William







Tim Hall[1]


18 July 2012 17:49 


If you reread my message you will see I did say they keep adding features.
What they are not doing in my opinion is making it a better product.
Features do not equal user experience.


Cheers



TIM...








Michael Moore[2]


18 July 2012 16:07 


Quest has done little to make it a better product over the years?
Seriously, wtf? I've been a TOAD beta tester for the last 5 years. They've
added literally hundres of new features some pretty awesome some less so.
Code folding, split screens, new formatter, unicode, 64bit, auto database
reconnect, document recovery. Yeah, Toad is the swiss army knife but unlike
a knife, if there are parts you don't use you can generally hide them. I've
been coding PL/SQL for over 10 years, and I love how toad makes me at least
twice as productive as I'd be without it. I don't work for Quest and am in
no way associated with them.


Anyhow, I'm not doing much pl/sql these days, I've moved on to Salesforce
development platform. see force.com



Mike







Tim Hall[3]


18 July 2012 14:36 


I don't have a problem with any company making money out of a product.
I paid for a multi-platform unlimited upgrades license for UltraEdit
because I like the product and it does what I need. I think there is
room for open and closed products.



My point is TOAD is a money earner for Quest, yet they've done little
to make it a better product over the years. New versions come out and
they keep adding features (bloat), but it seems nobody has invested
any time in the user experience, which is terrible. Actually, terrible
is being incredibly kind. It was a horrible product when I first used
it (before Quest bought it) and it still is.



Oracle were very lazy in this respect for many years, but now they are
investing heavily in improving the user experience throughout there
products. Check out their UX labs etc.



TOAD is like crack for PL/SQL developers. They need to go cold turkey
and they will find out life is much better without it. They might just
learn a little about databases also.



Just my opinion. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I'm happy
for people to disagree. :)



Cheers



Tim...








Norman Dunbar[4]


18 July 2012 13:14 



What's wrong with a company making money from a product? Oracle makes 
money from their database, for example, why not Quest?



There's a perfectly good free version of Toad as well. I use it myself 
from time to time, and I'm more of a DBA that a Developer.



I've got databases from 7.3.4 up through 11.2.0.3 to look after and some 
of the free tools, including Oracle's own, cannot connect to the older 
versions. Toad quite happily does - as long as there is a suitable 
client of course. Even with a suitable client, Oracle's own "toad 
killer" tool won't connect. (Caveat - unless it has changed recently of 
course!)



Support for Toad is excellent too, you can talk directly with the 
developers on the support groups, and you also get the benefits of the 
Toad MVPs as well - Rich, Ed and (declaration of interest) myself.



You can even run Toad on Linux.



Obviously, we all have our opinions.




Cheers,


Norm.







Tim Hall[5]


18 July 2012 13:02 


TOAD is a cash cow for Quest. Lots of companies keep buying licenses
because they can't be bothered to check the (free) alternatives. It's
a product that really needs to be put out of its misery for all our
sakes. Yes I really do hate that product!



Cheers



Tim...






[IMG]&Oslash;yvind Isene[6]


18 July 2012 07:53 


+1 for SQL Developer. It is easy to bring with me when I go to a new place -
just have the zip-file ready, no installation necessary. It is steadily
improving with new useful features, like exploring and creating new jobs in
scheduler. 



Earlier I got the impression that Toad was more invasive, in the sense it
wanted to run several queries against the database that the user was not
aware of. Some of them was DBA-kind of queries not relevant for developers.
If you google, you'll find several techniques on how to block Toad from
production databases, I imagine I'm not the only one who got annoyed by the
way Toad behaves. 



Though I'm a DBA/consultant and not doing much coding for the moment, I find
SQL Developer sufficient to debug and write new PL/SQL code.



Will be interesting to see what Dell makes out of Toad now they have bought
Quest.








Kellyn Pot'vin[7]


18 July 2012 00:36 


Yay, I thought I was the only DBA who didn't use TOAD! (Thank you, Tim!)
I would like to also see TOAD on a diet as I've seen it in an environment
with 25+ licenses and observed how "heavy" it was. Loved Embarcadero DB
Artisan, but also quite heavy in the environment.



I have used PL/SQL Developer for numerous years, content with it for the
little I required, but latest release, (9.x.x) had some bugs. 
SQL Developer is coming up fast in the ranks with features and I give a lot
of credit to the team that they have on this product.  



As a remote DBA, my only tools I have available to me now are command
line...:)  As I've said in blogs/tweets, etc.-  I strongly believe that any
code that will be released to production should be verified will
successfullycompile at the command line, (SQL*Plus), NOT JUST with a GUI
Tool.  Doing any less is asking for issues with a release, especially if
yourdatabase is on a Unix/Linux platform and you have some type of version
control software that is in place. 


~Tombez sept fois, se relever huit!   Kellyn Pot'Vin
Senior Technical Consultant


Enkitec


DBAKevlar.com





From: Tim Hall <tim_at_oracle-base.com>[8]
To: william_at_williamrobertson.net[9] 


Cc: "JChirco_at_innout.com"[10] <JChirco_at_innout.com>[11];
"oracle-l_at_freelists.org"[12] <oracle-l_at_freelists.org>[13] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 4:51 PM


Subject: Re: PL/SQL Development Tool Of Choice



I despise TOAD. It's got so much bloat. It's loaded on my desktop at
work and I never use it.



I think SQL*Developer is neat, free, and does what I need it to. Far
less bloat than TOAD.



I used PL/SQL*Developer in one job and it was OK.



I often find myself opening stuff up in NotePad++ or UltraEdit (my
favorite text editor) and compiling in SQL*Plus. I tend to only use an
IDE when things get really complicated, like I need to use a debugger.
Most of the time I'm as productive in a plain text editor. I probably
wouldn't recommend that approach to a newbie though.



At the end of the day, you will probably prefer what you use the most,
or what you are forced to use by your corporate policy. :)



Cheers



Tim...











Tim Hall[14]


17 July 2012 23:51 


I despise TOAD. It's got so much bloat. It's loaded on my desktop at
work and I never use it.



I think SQL*Developer is neat, free, and does what I need it to. Far
less bloat than TOAD.



I used PL/SQL*Developer in one job and it was OK.



I often find myself opening stuff up in NotePad++ or UltraEdit (my
favorite text editor) and compiling in SQL*Plus. I tend to only use an
IDE when things get really complicated, like I need to use a debugger.
Most of the time I'm as productive in a plain text editor. I probably
wouldn't recommend that approach to a newbie though.



At the end of the day, you will probably prefer what you use the most,
or what you are forced to use by your corporate policy. :)



Cheers



Tim...






William Robertson[15]


17 July 2012 22:52 


Definitely PL/SQL Dev for me for its clean interface, stability and
extensibility - though the dual monitor flicker issue you mention in
version 9 looks a bit annoying.



SQL Developer has some nice features but the blocky fonts hurt my
eyes, and for something that will be in front of me all day that just
rules it out for serious use.



My current site doesn't provide PL/SQL Developer and has an Internet
Use policy forbidding personal downloads, so for the first time ever I
am forced to use TOAD 9.7. I certainly hope the current version is a
lot better because it really is unbelievably awful. As well as
crashing regularly and lacking an effective recovery mechanism, its
editor is horrible, its session monitor is unusable, the macro learn
feature requires you to type in a name each time you use it, it
doesn't support third party plugins, even changing the font has most
developers baffled, and I might be missing something but it appears
that the code formatter is unable to align 'and' underneath 'where'. I
can only imagine the product was written this way deliberately as some
sort of sick joke.



William Robertson




On 17 Jul 2012, at 20:37, Jeff Chirco <JChirco_at_innout.com>[16] wrote:



This probably has been asked before but what is everybody's PL/SQL
development tool they use? I currently use PL/SQL Developer by
Allround Automations and I like. It is cheap, simple, and easy to use
and does about everything I need. But there is a major bug
(http://forums.allroundautomations.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number
B938#Post42938[17])


with screen flashing with dual monitors that is driving me crazy and
it appears the developer has now interest in fixing it.
Toad


I have looked at Toad a little bit and I know that it is popular tool
that does a lot but it seems like it is a little cumbersome. There is
just so much going. Plus the price might be hard to get approval for.
Yesterday I downloaded the freeware version of Toad and it is really
slow, it takes like 8 seconds to bring up a package from the database
for editing.



Rapid SQL by Embarcadero


I looked at this very briefly and I couldn't even figure out how to
use it. If it is not intuitive to use then I'm out.



Everybody else chime in with their own reviews and or suggestions.



Thanks.



--



http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l[18]






Jeff Chirco[19]


17 July 2012 20:35 


This probably has been asked before but what is everybody's PL/SQL
development tool they use? I currently use PL/SQL Developer by Allround
Automations and I like. It is cheap, simple, and easy to use and does about
everything I need. But there is a major bug
(http://forums.allroundautomations.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number
B938#Post42938[20]) with screen flashing with dual monitors that is driving
me crazy and it appears the developer has now interest in fixing it.
Toad


I have looked at Toad a little bit and I know that it is popular tool that
does a lot but it seems like it is a little cumbersome. There is just so
muchgoing. Plus the price might be hard to get approval for. Yesterday I
downloaded the freeware version of Toad and it is really slow, it takes like
8 seconds to bring up a package from the database for editing.



Rapid SQL by Embarcadero


I looked at this very briefly and I couldn't even figure out how to use it.
If it is not intuitive to use then I'm out.



Everybody else chime in with their own reviews and or suggestions.



Thanks.



--



http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l[21]









--



http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Thu Jul 19 2012 - 02:28:17 CDT












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