SQL Developer is Production

It's Monday, it's March and the new kid on the block is SQL Developer! Yup, SQL Developer 1.0 is now production. If you haven't seen this product yet, try it. Download it from Oracle Technology Network (OTN) unzip it into a directory and you're set.

The product was announced at Oracle World (OraTransplant Blog) last year, we released the first early access release on the 28th Dec 2005 and followed with a number of releases after that. If you'd like to see all the releases take a look at Eddie's blog. The key thing about all these releases is that we've been able to respond to requests and feedback from the community. I might have said this on Groundside before, it's been an exciting few months.

Part of the reason we were able to get the product out to the community so quickly is that is is built using the JDeveloper IDE. Written in Java, it installs on platforms that will run a JVM. So we offer support for Windows, the Mac OS X and Linux. Overheard in a friend's office the other day... "Hey, have you seen this new SQL tool from Oracle? It's great and it installs on Linux!" (or words similar, the sentiment is there)

As someone who was involved with Oracle Designer for many years, I know the frustration users have when they are looking for new features in a product and we either can't respond or it takes many months, if not years, to respond. SQL Developer is a much smaller product, with none of the dependencies Designer and many other Oracle products have, so the flexibility of being able to respond to needs is there. I have loved this interaction and know the team have enjoyed it too. Again referring to Designer, we started a community source project, where a team of users worked on and supplied code and input to the Designer team to add functionality to the product. It was good. It brough the community closer to the product. It's not open source, in that we still own the ocde and write the code, but these past few months before SQL Developer's 1.0 production release have been like a community project, with the community getting involved and responding in a really positive manner. Being involved means you, the users get the product youreally want.

Many folk in the community have already started reviewing and using the product, so I won't say more, let's tip-toe across a few more blogs and articles out there...

• ITToolbox (First impressions, early Feb)
• Amis (starting to look at extensions)
• Andrew Clark (Starting to change his ideas on SQL Developer and happy to get things fixed quickly)
• Dan Hotka has written a long review in the Oracle Professional newsletter
• OTN Techblog (This one is a little closer to home)
• Jeff Hunter (First Impressions)
• For ongoing and regular SQL Developer updates, you do need to keep a link to Kris' blog....

This list is longer, do a few searches and you'll find them.

Aah, you'll be wanting know about support. Ask questions on the Forum, talk to mates and of course, if you have a Database Support license, you also have SQL Developer Support.

The next bit to look at is the extsnion API. There are already a few folk out there getting down to writing extensions (plugins) so now that it's production, the race is on. Let's get writing. What extension are you going to build?