Improvements noticed: better data browser, ability to edit data in the grid, better support for BLOBs, including viewing images directly. Lots of other little improvements and bug fixes throughout.

Probably the main things that I miss from PL/SQL Developer, that neither SQL Developer nor TOAD support, are:
(a) truly context-sensitive menus (e.g. right-click on the name of a table anywhere in the code editor and get table-related functions)
(b) configurable schema browser (e.g. create additional categories apart from the basic Tables, Views, etc. – e.g. have a category that groups all the tables, views, procedures, etc. related to a particular issue – and colour-code them so they stand out in the other lists).

However, I’ve found SQL Developer is a much more mature product now than it was 6 years ago.

There are two things that still bug me:

1. Slow start-up time. Seriously – why does it need to take so long to start up? If I’m in a hurry, it’s always quicker to open a putty session, log in, start sqlplus, and start typing my commands. This is where Allround’s product beats both TOAD and SQL Developer – it’s lean and mean.

2. Poor performance when connecting to a remote database. The schema browser is where this becomes very noticeable – all it takes is accidentally clicking on the name of a table, and I’ll be waiting 30-40 seconds before I get control again, because it has to load all the table, column and constraint definitions. It’s quite ironic that loading 100 rows from a query, with however many columns, is blazingly fast, whereas loading the definitions for a 20 column table is painfully slow. It looks like it suffers from “slow-by-slow” logic here.

So far I’ve found that some query changes are relatively easy for them to retrofit into HQL. For example, if they’ve got a correlated subquery as part of the predicate, they might not be able to roll it into a join to the main part of the query, but they can change the subquery itself – e.g. change from a “WHERE EXISTS ()” into a “WHERE x IN ()”, or vice versa. This sort of simple change is sometimes enough to cause the CBO to find a better plan.

I like to show how much you can do with SQL. I love it when I show developers elapsed time and buffer gets from the original generated query and the same metrics from the new SQL query. It’s great to see developers amazed when they discover how fast the database returns the data they need. I take the opportunity to tell them Oracle does much more than just store data.

(seriously– this is pretty cool stuff. I could actually imagine a Warehouse Builder user getting all kinds of interesting and unexpected things done with this…)

Thanks for Sharing

Every time you restart your EC2 instance, you get a new host name. Every time you get a new host name, your Oracle Listener fails because it’s configured by host name. So I was updating the listener.ora file after every restart (reboots are not a problem because the host name doesn’t change). Since I am mostly broke, I couldn’t leave the instance running 24/7.

So I copied the listener.ora file into a file called listener.template. Then, in the template file, I changed the host name to ‘myName’. I wrote a shell script that uses sed to find and replace ‘myName’ with the current host name. Finally, the script restarts Oracle 11 XE and the listener.

Once I got the script working, it was then a matter of configuring it to run at run level 3 on every start up, which, depending upon your Linux, can be really easy or rather not easy. I use SuSE 11, so I had to learn how to create a ‘service’ script, save that script to /etc/init.d, create a link to it in /etc/init.d/rc3.d, then execute a chkconfig -add .

Here is the script:

#
# changeHostname
# ————–
#
# 22 March 2012
#
# bash script to change the hostname in the LISTENER.ORA file
# this needs to be done every time you launch your AWS cloud machines
# that are not permanent (a.k.a expensive).
#
#
LISTENER=’/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/network/admin/’
NEWNAME=`/bin/hostname`

sed “s/myName/$NEWNAME/” ${LISTENER}listener.template > ${LISTENER}listener.ora

/etc/init.d/oracle-xe restart

You need to change the LISTENER variable to the location of your listener.ora file.

I have the other scripts too if interested.