oracle windows gui for newbie?

Hi. I'm not a database programmer myself, but I do a lot of work where I take existing data and move it into database environments such as Access or mySQL. I am now going to need to start working with Oracle and am looking for a suggestion on a good Windows GUI that is friendly for a person who is not a DBA.

In short, I will be taking data that is stored in Excel or Access, and need to be able to port it quickly into tables in an Oracle DB. I need an interface that will make it easy to create a table, import the data, and later on join tables and normalize the data. I know that it is wimpy, but Access lets me do this relatively quickly and easily, which is important. I will have access through JDBC, but not ODBC if that makes any difference.

I've been told to look at Toad and PL/SQL. I would appreciate knowing if there are any other friendly GUI tools that would work well for this sort of work, free/open source is fine if there is such a thing available. I also have the Oracle windows client running (9i R2), but am not sure if that is more useful for administration than for actual work with data. I have also managed to successfully connect Openoffice.org 1.1, but it seems to allow only read access -- I can't seem to create tables or input data through the program.

Thanks in advance,

--chris Received on Wed Dec 17 2003 - 22:28:17 CST