IDE for Pl/SQL development

Question

Is there any free IDE for Pl/SQL development

Answer 1

I personally like http://www.allroundautomations.nl/plsqldev.html

Quite usefull for PL/SQL and Oracle in general. But not free.

Answer 2

Toad gets reasonable comments from the developers around me that have to work with Oracle. Everyone hates Oracle SQL developer. I have little personal experience.

Answer 3

I use SQL Developer every day to develop packages. Whilst it's not perfect, it's got some useful features:

• Syntax highlighting;
• Autocompletion;
• Debugging (although not of live requests as far as I can tell);
• Simple connection configuration (JDBC-based as well as TNSNAMES);
• ...

It's also free, unlike the (admittedly better) Toad mentioned previously.

Answer 4

SQL Tools is a free PL/SQL IDE that is lightweight and fast, and it's free. Although one feature it's missing is a debugger support.

Answer 5

I am using PL/SQL Developer from Allround automation, too.

I kinda hate it dearly for all its bugs and that we paid a full year maintenance w/o seeing anything new in that period. But for some rather strange reason it still beats the hell out of all the other outrageously overprized and underfeatured tools for PL/SQL. And I am not talking about Oracle administration, which it can do quite good as well, thx to how fast one can script things in it. Its focus is PL/SQL, not point & click table creation. But than, my Grand Ma could build a tool for managing tables, users, etc. A good code editor is not as easy. g

One thing, besides the countless little bugs that face every time is, that it is completely ignorant to the fact, that Oracle has an escape syntax for non-standard identifiers. You can't do much using its GUI with such objects but have to resort to the command window or any other editor to script it yourself.

btw, the fact that I still use it and prefer over its alternatives doesn't reflect very well on the market of commercial Oracle IDEs, IMO. I think for writing DB code it is better than anything from any DBMS I have come across so far. It has very little GUI support for stuff, but its different code editors are very capable and productive.