Some New Bits for You: The Migration Workbench and a new Search

What Release of SQL Developer are you Using?
I am sure you are all on SQL Developer 1.1 Patch 2 (1.1.2.25.79) If you are, then you might be interested in the 2 features I am going to talk about below. I do know some of you are not on patch 2 and there are still many of you still on 1.0 (1.0.0.15.57). I am sure there are lots of reasons you don't upgrade to a new release. Better the devil you know...etc. Maybe you are from a big company and so new software is rolled out slowly. Maybe you just didn't hear the news. (I've been a pretty poor blogger...) Maybe you are concerned about some of the entries on the forum and so won't try the new release. Did it occur to you that you may use the product for different things? That you might find the updates just perfect for you? Performance improvements, a few new context menus, some powerful reporting capabilities?

Let's look at the releases. SQL Developer 1.0 was our initial release and many of you were excited by the release and started to use it. It does what you need, so you're happy. SQL Developer 1.1 brought a whole bunch of new features and a whole rewrite of underlying technology. When a rewrite happens, inevitably a few features may not make it back into the product. We had to weigh up delaying the release or getting it out to you quickly. We decided that the number of new features outweighed the few that were missing. In the same way as we did for 1.0, we quickly followed with 2 patch releases, filling in the gaps with the bugs that slipped the net. I know this is frustrating for you and there are a few of the inevitable rants about testing and quality. We agree, but the overwhelming feedback has been better in each release and we feel the latest patch release of SQL Developer brings you more functionality, performance and stability than the others. Try it, download from here!

Migration Workbench - Early Adopter Release
Just last week we added something new. It might not be something you all need, but we know that many of you do have multiple databases and they're not all Oracle. We have seen your interest in the ability to connect to and browse third party databases. Well, the team that brought you the Oracle Migration Workbench, have rewritten the Workbench as an extension to SQL Developer. This extension is designed to give you a seamless experience; moving from browsing a third party database to migrating the database schema definitions and schema data to an Oracle database schema. Once you have completed the migration you can continue to work with and query your data, using SQL Developer.

The Workbench Extension is currently a preview or early adopter release and so is only available through Check For Updates, using SQL Developer 1.1. patch 2 (1.1.2.25.79) So that's one really important reason to move up to Patch 2. We will release SQL Developer Migration Workbench as a complete SQL Developer install for production. For more information about the new extension see this page.

A Snippet of Information - Searching Database Objects.

In SQL Developer 1.1, you might have notice the new DB Search Object. Have you tried it? You'll find it in a minimized window on the right, near your Snippets window. (That is until you start rearranging your windows.)

It's neat in that you can do a search for a database object and it'll search across schemas. In my example below I did a wild card search for occurrences of EMP%. It produced a healthy list.
Once an object is found, the same context menus, you'll find for your objects in the navigator, are available to you in the search window.




So this week's task for you is to update your SQL Developer release and have a play. My tasks for this week are to update each of my blogs daily! (Aside from being slack here, I have outstanding photo and Delhi entries to update!) Let's see how we do.

Sue