Recommendation for JDBC SQL client tool

Question

Can someone recommend a good, open source, standalone developer tool for querying SQL databases using JDBC and exporting the results to a file? I know a lot of database vendors provide their own tools, but I need one that will allow me to plug in my own custom JDBC driver and work against any database. A GUI is preferable, but not required.

Oracle's SQL Developer is disqualified because it seems to work only with a pre-canned set of JDBC drivers. I have also looked at the list of tools at Java-Source.net, but I'm hoping someone can help me narrow down the list based on personal experience. And it needs to be standalone so non-developers can use it, too, which disqualifies Eclipse plug-ins. Thanks!

Answer 1

I use SQuirreL SQL and I' pretty happy with it. I'm pasting the "Overview" below:

SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical Java program that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc, see Introduction. The minimum version of Java supported is 1.6.x as of SQuirreL version 3.0. See the Old Versions page for versions of SQuirreL that will work with older versions of Java.

SQuirreL's functionality can be extended through the use of plugins.

A short introduction can be found here. To see the change history (including changes not yet released) click here.

For a more detailed introduction see the English or German of our paper on SQuirreL.

Susan Cline graciously took the time to document the steps she followed to setup an Apache Derby database from scratch and use the SQuirreL SQL Client to explore it.

Quite some time ago Kulvir Singh Bhogal wrote a great tutorial on SQuirreL and published it at the IBM developerWorks site. He has kindly allowed us to mirror it locally. The tutorial is not really up to date but especially for doing the first steps it is still of help.

SQuirrel was originally released under the GNU General Public License. Since version 1.1beta2 it has been released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

It's maybe not the most nice looking application but it does its job, and pretty fast: add or configure your driver, create an alias, and there you go. Actually, it's my favorite Universal SQL Client.

Answer 2

I'd like to throw in a vote for DbVisualizer.

Answer 3

I'd agree with Pascal about SQuirrel SQL, that does the job for almost everything.

However if I remember rightly, its support for SQL triggers is lacking - it couldn't display the source code of the trigger, at least in the version I was using (3.0.2)

For this scenario, I found the free (but not open-source) SQL Workbench does the job, which in itself is a more than decent tool.

If I'm not working with triggers though, I'd recommend using SQuirrel SQL