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Oracle SQL Development Environment in Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the does-this-exist? dept.

Jón Ragnarsson asks: "I develop Oracle applicatons for a living. And they are usually internet-related. Right now I'm developing on a Oracle 8i / Windows NT4 machine. But I have more and more become aware that NT is very limiting compared to un*x when it comes to selection of tools and servers for Internet development. I have installed Apache, perl, php and other stuff on the NT, but with much difficulty. So now I'm planning to switch my development environment to Linux (RedHat, Debian or SuSE). The thing I would miss most is the SQL Navigator, a tool I don't know how I could live without it before I started to use it. :) I know there are some utilities available for postgres and mysql in KDE, but AFAIK, they don't work on Oracle databases. Any ideas what I could replace SQL Navigator with? Or should I start writing my own database front end?" Hey! I develop Oracle apps on Solaris and could use something like this myself!

7 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. oracletool.pl by jabbo · · Score: 3
    This thing is a tool of the gods. You need to be reasonably comfortable with Oracle and (somewhat) with Perl, but DAMN is it fly. About the only thing it won't let you do really easily is get the query planner to barf up its plan, but that could probably be hacked in easily.

    http://www.oracletool.com/

    Yeah, it's free as in speech and beer, too.

    There's something called "Orac" as well, but it's in Perl/Tk rather than with a web interface, so I prefer the oracletool, myself. Simple to use, even NT people grasp it immediately.

    Good stuff!

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  2. Java is not a codeless framework; try DIA by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 3
    The thing about the "pretty tools" (moving on up to things as sophisticated as ERWIN) is that they permit you to do the data modelling without writing any code. No Java needed. No Perl needed. Nothing needed.

    I have no problem agreeing that there will be a point in time at which it will prove necessary to start coding; the point is that there are portions of the system where it is downright invaluable to have purely declarative definitions, which means that you've got a set of code on which you can unleash analysis tools that don't need to worry about the Turing-completeness of a full-scale language like Perl, PL/SQL, or Java.

    It would be, for instance, a very interesting idea to compose ER diagrams using a diagramming tool like Dia. Dia generates output in the form of XML.

    The really cool next step would be to take that XML and use it to generate the DDL code to generate the relevant tables, so that the diagrams represent not only instructive diagrams for communicating information about the design, but actually the code to define the declarative parts of the system.

    (Note: ERWIN has the ability to do this sort of thing, permitting one to both generate table definition code from the diagram as well as to generate a diagram based on SQL DDL code...)

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  3. SQL Dev't Environments by MattyG · · Score: 3
    Sadly, it seems like most of the strong Oracle development tools are Windows only - cases in point:

    Golden, PL/Edit, http://www.benthicsoftware.com/

    and

    TOAD, the Tool for Oracle Application Developers, http://www.toadsoft.com/ .

    If you can, keep a windows box to run these and your applications and just hit the server running on Linux, over SQL*Net.

    -matt
    ---
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  4. Check on Freshmeat.net by SoftwareJanitor · · Score: 3

    I punched 'oracle' into the search box on freshmeat.net and got back a whole slew of hits, several of which sound like possibilities for what this guy is asking for, and probably a few others that might be other interesting tools for him to look at.

  5. Maybe a dumb question. by hey! · · Score: 3

    Can't you use most management tools to manage a database over the network? Why not keep an NT workstation around to run the admin tools you can't get, while your database sits on Linux?

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  6. A couple of tips by tweek · · Score: 4

    First of join the Oracle-LINUX mailing list.

    Send email to ListGuru@fatcity.com
    In the body put SUBSCRIBE ORACLE-LINUX-L

    Many a great discussion happens on this list. It does generate a TON of traffic though.

    A good repository of tools is available at
    here


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  7. Great question... by nlh · · Score: 4

    I've been waiting for a discussion about this topic to pop up, so I'm happy to add my few cents.

    I'm currently working on a web development project (using Oracle 8.0.5) with some folks and we're using Linux as the development enviornment. I've not actually ever used NT for this sort of thing, so I'm not familiar with the joys of SQL Navigator (for better or for worse).

    In scouring the pages of freshmeat and other sources, the best tool I've found is called dbMan. It's based on Perl, Tk, and DBI interfaces and works quite well for some purposes.

    Currently, the version I have (0.0.9pre1) lets you browse and modify tables and table data in a spreadsheet-like interface (adding new rows doesn't seem to work perfectly), run command line SQL queries with command history, and do some basic import-export functions. (check the website for more details.)

    I am very interested, however, as to what other people use and if there's anything a bit more hard core than dbMan.

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