The content for this post was originally written in May 2017 at the request of one of our clients.
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What
Recently, I attended the Oracle Tech Day event here in Richmond at the local public library. There were two presenters:
Jeff Smith from Oracle
Scott Spendolini from Sumner Technologies
and three presentations:
Free developer tools from Oracle (Jeff)
Web services for APEX (Scott)
SQL Developer 4.2
Let's take a quick look at each of them.
Free developer tools from Oracle
The following tools were presented and discussed over the course of an hour:
SQL Developer Data Modeler
SQLcl
Oracle Application Express (APEX)
Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS)
Oracle SQL Developer Web
Oracle JET
VirtualBox
Oracle XE
LiveSQL
SQL Developer Data Modeler
As its name suggests, this is a relatively robust data modeling tool. To quote Oracle:
Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is a free graphical tool that enhances productivity and simplifies data modeling tasks. Using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler users can create, browse and edit, logical, relational, physical, multi-dimensional, and data type models. The Data Modeler provides forward and reverse engineering capabilities and supports collaborative development through integrated source code control. The Data Modeler can be used in both traditional and in Cloud environments.
SQLcl
SQLcl is a new command line interface to Oracle. They should have called this SQL*Plus*Plus, because that's what it is. To quote Oracle:
Oracle SQL Developer Command Line (SQLcl) is a free command line interface for Oracle Database. It allows you to interactively or batch execute SQL and PL/SQL. SQLcl provides in-line editing, statement completion, and command recall for a feature-rich experience, all while also supporting your previously written SQL*Plus scripts.
Oracle Application Express
Better known as APEX, Oracle Application Express is a web application that allows you to build web applications of your own. Admittedly, it's pretty nifty. To quote Oracle:
Oracle Application Express enables you to design, develop and deploy beautiful, responsive, database-driven applications using only your web browser. With Application Express, you can focus on the problem at hand. Much of the development process is managed for you: security, authentication, database interactions, input validation, session state management and many other dependencies work out of the box. All the tools you need are available in a single, extensible platform, which runs as a part of the Oracle Database.
Oracle REST Data Services
Better known as ORDS, Oracle REST Data Services allows you to quickly and easily enable REST-oriented web services for your existing schema. It provides a reasonable amount of functionality out of the box, before any custom coding is required. To quote Oracle:
Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) makes it easy to develop modern REST interfaces for relational data in the Oracle Database and now, with ORDS 3.0, the Oracle Database 12c JSON Document Store and Oracle NoSQL Database. ORDS is available both as an Oracle Database Cloud Service and on premise.
Oracle SQL Developer Web
This is what you would expect: the Oracle SQL Developer that we are all familiar with rewritten as a web application (i.e. it runs in your web browser). I could not find any information about this tool on the web, so either (A) I wrote down the wrong name or (B) it hasn't been released yet.
Update, October 2020: The product has been released and the documentation is now available at the link below.
ORACLE JET
Oracle JET is the web toolkit on which the Oracle SQL Developer Web tool is built. To quote Oracle:
Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) empowers developers by providing a modular open source toolkit based on modern JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5 design and development principles. Oracle JET is targeted at intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It's a collection of open source JavaScript libraries along with a set of Oracle contributed JavaScript libraries that make it as simple and efficient as possible to build applications that consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services.
VIRTUALBOX
In Oracle's own words:
Oracle VM VirtualBox is cross-platform virtualization software that allows you to run multiple operating systems, on your existing computer, at the same time. Designed for IT professionals, VirtualBox runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris systems and supports a wide range of guest operating systems. So, for example, you can run Windows on your Mac, run Linux on Windows, run Solaris on Linux, or run Windows 7 on Window XP. VirtualBox is ideal for testing, developing, demonstrating and deploying solutions across multiple platforms on one machine. VirtualBox Base Packages are open source software licensed under the GPLv2. Oracle VM VirtualBox Enterprise is a commercial license of the VirtualBox Extension Pack; Oracle technical support is also available, covering both the VirtualBox base packages and Oracle VM VirtualBox Enterprise.
Strangely, it doesn't mention what Jeff Smith mentioned as its greatest benefit: each VM comes pre-loaded with a fully-featured version of Oracle Enterprise.
ORACLE DATABASE EXPRESS EDITION
Better known as Oracle XE, Oracle Database Express Edition is a free, small-footprint and low-performance version of Oracle Database. To quote Oracle:
Oracle Database 11g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 code base. It's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer.
ORACLE LIVESQL
LiveSQL is an "Oracle worksheet in the cloud." Like many similar services for other runtimes environments, it allows you to write, run and share snippets of SQL. To quote Oracle:
Get instant access to the Oracle Database and learn from a collection of community scripts and tutorials. Write your own SQL scripts and easily share with others. All you need to get started is your Oracle.com account.
Web services for APEX
This presentation was a bit of a snoozer. Scott spent the better part of an hour explaining (A) what a web service was and (B) how you could avoid learning anything about them and stay in your PL/SQL "happy place." This approach was based on the assumption that the goal of any Oracle developer was to avoid having to know anything other than PL/SQL. I took issue with this assumption and already knew what a web service was, so this provided little benefit to me.
SQL Developer 4.2
This presentation by Jeff was a good one. He gave us a quick tour through SQL Developer 4.2 and pointed out various useful features that many developers might not be familiar with. These features are not necessarily new in version 4.2; that is simply the version he used for the demonstration. Here were some of them:
Command Line Interface
Real Time SQL Monitoring
Instance Viewer
Formatter - the code formatter has a brand new engine supporting the latest Oracle syntaxes
Drag and Drop - quickly copy objects and data by dragging and dropping one or more objects from one connection to another