The release of the database giant's free development tool could make designing and debugging database code much faster and easier, but only for those using recent versions.

Oracle released its free database coding tool, SQL Developer, known as Project Raptor during development, on Tuesday. SQL Developer is aimed at making PL/SQL development simpler by providing an IDE environment for working with Oracle databases. The tool works with Oracle Database 9.2.0.1 or later.

SQL Developer is built on top of Oracle's Java IDE, JDeveloper, and is itself written in Java. Oracle supports running SQL Developer on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It uses the JDBC Thin driver for Oracle, so you don't need to have the Oracle client installed to use the tool.

SQL Developer provides an object browser, a syntax-highlighted SQL editor, and a debugger for PL/SQL. The editor includes many common IDE features like code snippets and code folding. There's also a reporting tool included, and a suite of pre-built reports. SQL Developer isn't aimed at database administrators who are responsible for day-to-day maintenance, and so lacks features like configuration and backup.

Oracle has never previously provided an IDE-level tool for working with its databases. There are a few commercial SQL development tools available, such as TOAD, but any official tools have been command-line based, and were difficult to use for development work. The equivalent tool from the open source Eclipse project, the Data Tools Platform (DTP), hasn't yet reached a 1.0 release, but Oracle is still planning to support DTP in its databases once it reaches production quality. SQL Developer's functionality will be incorporated into future versions of JDeveloper.

SQL Developer is available for download from the Oracle web site.

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