Just What is SQL Developer?

I've noticed this over the years, that as people become more and more familiar with a topic or subject area, they assume the rest of the world is right there with them and rattle on in terminology and concepts that would boggle most brains. I think you can take most subjects and you'll find this to be so, it's not just an IT thing...

I remember sitting at a brown bag lunch at a user conference a few years back. The point of the gathering was that anyone with questions could come along and ask questions and other with experience in the product would help and answer. The intentions were well meaning, the idea being to grow a community of sharing experience. As I sat in the back listening, I realised the experts were so far advanced and so skilled in the subject area, that they couldn't (or didn't) answer the basic questions. They were so used to dipping into the API and their own additional code, they'd got beyond the basic product! They were so used to responding to deep technical problems, that they didn't really hear the question. The answer to "Mum, where do I come from?" might just be "Cape Town" !

I fall into the same trap too. When asked to write an article for a magazine recently, I said "What would I write about?" The response was that we need articles for entry level. I accept it's true we need to have advanced material and more technical articles both at conferences and in our journals, but we should not forget that there are so many levels in our knowledge and expertise. More often than not, when submitting a collection of abstracts to a conference, it's my introductory talks that are accepted from the selection.

I've only been involved with Oracle SQL Developer for a few months now and already I assume that everyone who uses an Oracle Database should have heard about it. But why should they? There is so much news and information coming from Oracle and other companies all the time, that we're all getting quite good at filtering spam. (Basically, just deleting messages which appear to be spam). I should also remember that even after 2 years of presenting on the Database support Oracle JDeveloper offers, I was still encountering significant percentages of folk in the audience who had no idea JDeveloper had this capability. So this kind of news takes time to filter into the general community. As with other information, it's only useful or relevant when you need it!

We've just added a brief "What is SQL Developer" article onto our site on OTN. If you've not heard of the tool, or are afraid to ask, because, like me, you might assume the rest of the world already knows, then check it out.

Of course if you know about SQL Developer, it doesn't harm to take a look and see if it does something you weren't aware of!

By the way, we released a patch to our production release, Oracle SQL Developer 1.0, so you can Check For Updates. If you are going to be using the check for updates capabilities, then do be sure you are on the production release. (See the FAQ if you're uncertain)