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Oracle SQL Development Environment in Linux? 118

Posted by Cliff from the does-this-exist? dept.
Jón Ragnarsson asks: "I develop Oracle applicatons for a living. And they are usually internet-related. Right now I'm developing on a Oracle 8i / Windows NT4 machine. But I have more and more become aware that NT is very limiting compared to un*x when it comes to selection of tools and servers for Internet development. I have installed Apache, perl, php and other stuff on the NT, but with much difficulty. So now I'm planning to switch my development environment to Linux (RedHat, Debian or SuSE). The thing I would miss most is the SQL Navigator, a tool I don't know how I could live without it before I started to use it. :) I know there are some utilities available for postgres and mysql in KDE, but AFAIK, they don't work on Oracle databases. Any ideas what I could replace SQL Navigator with? Or should I start writing my own database front end?" Hey! I develop Oracle apps on Solaris and could use something like this myself!
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Oracle SQL Development Environment in Linux? More

Oracle SQL Development Environment in Linux?

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  • Re:oracletool.pl (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's ridiculous. I am the author of Oracletool, and I can assure you that it does not do full table scans on ANY user based tables (Which are the ones with millions of rows). Oracletool selects from the Oracle data dictionary, and ONLY from the Oracle data dictionary, _except_ in the case that you ask to see the first 25 rows of a table (which is an option, not a forced query). I develop Oracletool on a 12 node Oracle Parallel Server environment which is more that one Terabyte in size, and use Oracletool constantly. I think you have my tool mixed up with someone elses. Regards, Adam vonNieda http://www.oracletool.com mailto:adam@oracletool.com

  • emacs ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For interactive querying i routinely use one of sql-modes for emacs ( xemacs in my case :) - it's just a wrapper around sqlplus with all the bells and whistles of emacs editing - completions, searches and so on. I hacked it a little to enable "explain plan" capability which i really missed, and now i'm nearly satisfied. Data dictionary lookups may add some convinience to it, but you may use excellent oracletool.pl by Adam vonNieda for almost everything - unfortunately, it has a bug in "show view source" code, and i'm too lazy to fill a bug report :)

    Also there is some emacs mode for pl/sql editing - with identation, syntax colors and so on - on oracle site (technet.oracle.com)

    Alexey Vekshin,

    vekshin@usa.net

  • Re:One Word (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is a mirror of the Orac web site at: http://www.tux.org/orac-dba/ Orac is a perl/Tk tool for Oracle DBAs/Developers. There is a short article about this tool in the November issue of "Linux Journal"

  • Re:oracletool.pl (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm an Oracle DBA for a major manufacturing company. We downloaded Oracletool and really enjoyed it. After a few days we noticed that quite a few of the scripts are NOT designed to be used in a large enviroment. Large, as in, 60+ gigs, with 1,000 users, and Oracle Inventory, WIP, BOM, and various other packages. We would see Oracletool queries not using established indexes (doing FULL table scans on hundreds of million of rows is not a good idea)

    So. As a review: Use Oracletool ONLY if you are in a small enviroment, or you watch it like a hawk to make sure that you are not locking/running away.

  • You can use Oracle's enterprise manager (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Before I switched to linux I used toad, but mainly to browse database object. I always used vi/rcs/sqlplus for development. On linux development is still done with vi/rcs/sqlplus, for browsing the database I now use oracle enterprise manager. You can install the NT version on a dual boot machine, then boot linux and copy all the oracle enterprise manager java jars to your 8.1.5 installation on unix (actually I have two oracle home's, one for 8.1.5 and one for oem2.0.4). Now you can run oem with the blackdown jvm version 1.1.7. Sadly ibm's jit does not work. Andrej

  • Running Oracle applicatons under Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Use VMWARE and run an NT window on your Linux system. You get the best of both worlds Linux and the pretty NT app. Very cool. I watched an NT window blue screen and not bother the underlying Linux one bit. www.vmware.com and no I don't work for them.

  • This is what SQL*NET (NET8) is for.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why abandon what already works for you?

    Basically anything you can do on the machine hosting the database can be accomplished via SQL*NET/NET8 (the Oracle RDBMS's communication protocol) which runs just fine over any TCP/IP (or other protocol) network. To my knowledge basically all tools designed to work with Oracle support the use of SQL*NET.

    Continue to use your NT-based tools and connect via SQL*NET to the server. This is probably a good idea anyway. Why bog down your database server running a bunch of client tools? Using SQL*NET you only create a database server process of a meg. or so in size (assuming dedicated connections) which you would have anyway even if you run everything "locally".

    This is not to say you shouldn't use good Linux-based tools available to you but there is no requirement to run them on the server itself.
  • Hey, I suggest everyone put in a request for the author of TOAD to port his app to Linux. I spoke on the phone with one of their sales reps, and when she asked what they could do to make a better product, I said "ya, port it to Linux!"

    She actually said that there were quite a few requests for Linux, and the author was seriously considering it. Hell, I would buy it if they did! No, its not open source. But it has been free for as long as anyone remembers (until they were bought out by Quest software that is...)

  • > I do Sybase & Perl development all day.
    > I'd scream if they took away my isql.

    You should really see sqsh:

    http://www.voicenet.com/~gray/sqsh.html [voicenet.com]

    This is what all CLI database tools should do. And it's open source.

  • Hey!
    Once you're done with this project would you let me know?
    Thanks.
    ;)

  • Well, in all fairness, he DID give the guy a link to some Oracle tools for Linux. I don't see how pointing him to a mailing list where there are many people doing what he is trying to do could hurt either. There are plenty of responses and everyone contributes what they can. Relax a bit.

  • Hmm. except it is slow as hell and you can't use most of your hardware.
  • I run Kmysql to connect to Mysql, but I believe it supports plugins to connect to oracle among other database engines. It is still early in development but seemed to be pretty clean when I ran it.
  • You also might want to check out Oracle's WebDB product (which is available for Linux) which allows you to do a lot of DBA and development stuff (particularly simple web-based apps) via a web client from anywhere. It's all .html on the client side.

    What puzzles me is that Oracle's DBA tools (like Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is pretty damn slick) and some of their development tools are _written in Java_ ...yet they're available for NT only...stupid
  • I've had wet dreams of getting a replacement for SQL*Plus that worked just like the MySQL command line client. You know, *PROPER* ReadLine command history, tablename completion and all that.
  • I know that there is a project afoot to rewrite most of the basic utilities in perl. This would, in effect, allow an instant port to NT. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the project. Perhaps some kind soul out there could enlighten us?

  • SqlNavigator is a great tool for doing work with Oracle Applications, since most of the tables are too large to be viewed through sqlplus. It's also a very good tool for picking up a database that you don't have a good relation diagram for...
  • Probably a better system than CygWin is U/Win, available from AT&T: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/


  • i know developers who run sql navigator or TOAD
    inside VMWare [vmware.com] emulations. This works quite good!
  • VMware is certainly not slow for me - if it's slow for you, you most probably have too little memory. It's not too good for running games, but for running office type apps, it's excellent. I run it on a K6/2-350 and in practical terms it's as fast as running natively.

    If you have performance problems, post them to the vmware.* newsgroups, and if they don't help, submit an incident report.

  • Not listed on Mattshouse, but nearly what the guy is looking for is KMySQL [freshmeat.net].
    Despite its name, the recent versions of KMySQL have a plugin architecture with support for PostgreSQL and mysql.
    It would be worthwhile to add ORACLE support by writing a plugin
  • A big AMEN! bro. IMHO the evil empire has got Oracle beat here, although I'm really looking forward to checking out KMYSQL, http://www.xnot.com/kmysql/ [xnot.com]
  • I agree. This one's dead on topic. I mentioned KMySQL in anther thread myself.
  • Actually, if you want the links to work, go to http://oracle.mattshouse.com
  • It takes more than coders to see an operating system past version 1.0; you have to have users too. If there were no Linux advocates then there would be no Linux, at least not as we know it today. I for one am grateful that there are people willing to stick their neck out and try to make solutions work for the first time on Linux.

    Because of their pioneering work, the rest of us have the option to deploy on a cheap, fast, flexible and reliable platform. If you'd rather deploy on NT with all it's poor design features and buggy implementation, fine, but don't come crying to us.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • This is arrant nonsense. Because:

    1) They certainly do look at the facts as it's the only effective way to proceed with such experiments.

    2) If the experiment succeeds and publishes a howto, it makes it possible for others to do the same in future. How is that counterproductive? It's just the opposite, contributing to the common good.

    What you have failed to recognise is that sometimes the aim isn't just to find the easiest solution. Sometimes the desired aim is to find the best one, or even just to push out in a strategic direction that will take you closer to where you want to be in the future.

    You seem not to realise that it's more or less axiomatically a good thing to have alternatives available. My guess is you've been using Microsoft platforms so long that alternatives seem inferior to you, a priori.

    Which of us has adopted the closed minded attitude here? The revolutionary experimenter...or the conservative reactionary?

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Check http://sourceware.cygnus.com./cygwin/ and
    http://commit.winehq.com/~lynch/DebianGNU-win 32.html,
    as well as the win32 mailing list at
    http://debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe.
  • Just kidding. I've been doing the Oracle thing for almost a year and am still astounded at just how bad SQL*Plus is. Unfortunately I use it everday. Most of my development is in C using Pro*C, so GUI tools aren't much help.

    I am about to setup my own web server with an Oracle backend. I want to play around with WebDB and PHP3. I also need to play around with Developer because Oracle doesn't offer a certification program for 3GL programmers and I'm not ready to get into Oracle's Java mess.

    BTW, PL/SQL, the Oracle procedural language, actually beat out Perl in my book as the most obscure language. The syntax is really funky and the use of semicolons is inconsistent with every language I've ever used.

    But enough griping. If Oracle didn't make such screwy interfaces, people like me wouldn't make as much money making them work...

  • This is a little off-topic, but since he was talking about the difficulty of installing things like apache and php under NT, I feel justified.

    To what extent can the GNU tools be wrapped around NT? If the POSIX.1 layer of NT is still intact (maybe), then couldn't the other layers of POSIX be built on top of that? I know that a version of Bash has been ported to NT (but then it's been ported to DOS as well, and since I doubt that DOS could support things like coprocesses, I'm guessing the ported version isn't identical to the UNIX version.)

    (I suppose I should finally learn the specifications for the Debian standard base. Could the NT files be moved around to make space for, say, /usr/local and still work? Hmmm...to get devices to show up as files, you'd probably need kernel support... I'm showing my ignorace of kernel internals here...HURD moves device stuff out of kernel space into daemon space...)


    But in any event, a (perhaps limited) collection of the GNU tools for NT could make many a windows-imprisoned administrator's life easier. Does such a thing exist?

    "So, what do you want to hack for, Bickle?"
    "I can't sleep nights."
    "They got porno theaters for that."

  • I never knew that.

    Once I find my Linux Oracle CD I'm going to try one. I'd hate to think how much RAM it needs, though.

  • SQL Navigator and TOAD (which is similar and was recently purchased by Quest, the company that makes SQL Navigator) are essentially IDEs for Oracle. Using SQL Navigator or TOAD, you can browse tables in an Oracle database, edit table data, edit and compile stored procedures using a syntax-highlighting editor, and run ad-hoc sql queries.

    I recently evaluated all of the Linux tools mentioned here (Kora, Matt's suite of tools, Orac) and none of them has all of the features of SQL Navigator or TOAD. Kora comes closest, but it does not have a table data editor, and the stored procedure editor is not as nice as TOAD or SQL Navigator. Also, Kora uses its own proprietary client/server protocol which requires a server running on the Oracle database. SQL*Net does this already.

    That being said, I do most of my Oracle work in emacs with a combination of sql mode and sqlplus. Some people I work with have become quite reliant on SQL Navigator, and the downside is that they are in trouble when they are outside of that environment. It's the same issue as the GUI/command-line debate -- the SQL Navigator GUI insulates you from the command line (in this case, SQL*Plus).
  • Or try VNC, free way to remotely use windows from unix, or vice versa. http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ [att.com]
  • An explanation of SQL Navigator would be useful...

    -Bill
  • Maybe you missed his remarks that there are several tools (PHP, Perl, Apache) that he likes but is having difficulty running because of NT. It just so happens that those tools run very well under Linux.

    Could it be that he is trying to adapt to his situation! Mercy, no!
  • How about Vmware instead? Just my 2 cents.

  • Java? (Score:1)

    by CDanek ( 34285 )
    I'm surprised no one has mentioned java & swing as a viable alternative. Yeah, you'd have to write your own, but with the java.sql.* classes, it should be hard at all, maybe a day project for a qualified coder. Maybe I'll write one! Anyway, point being, java is the perfect language for something like this because just about all the tools you could ever want are there for you immediately to use, and it's cross platform. You'll have the exact same interface regardless of the OS you are in, and if you want improvements, you can make em yourself: eg, SQL Navigator's F9 to execute a query? What the heck! I want alt-x or shift-enter do execute it, like any other normal program. :) Whip open your key handler event map, change the key and boom, shift enter. Goooo java!
  • The ONLY decent way to run sql*plus is through emacs.
    If you use emacs "shell-mode" to run sql*plus, it makes up for the sql*plus' short-commings you mention.
    Actually makes it kinda nice...
    Now if somebody would write an emacs mode to interface to the oracle data dictionary so we'd have tab completion of table and column names...that'd be REAL sweet!!!
  • Yes! Yes! Now if some emacs-guru would write us an oracle-mode for emacs that will access ora's data dictionary to do tab-completion of schema, table and column names...that'd be TOO COOL!

    If Oracle Inc's got any sense, they'd kick in some $$$ to fund it too!
  • Check out DB_Browser [summersault.com], a powerful web-based interface for browsing/searching/editing/adding the data in an Oracle/Postgres/MySQL database.

    Your question might be better answered on a site more oriented towards software, e.g. Freshmeat.

  • no. the problem is that the NT model is significantly different from the UNIX model. ACLs and no standard permissions mean that NT is responsible for NT only.
  • I design for Sybase. Sybase has utilities / tools for linux number literally in the hundreds. I find it amazing that Oracle, which has the definate market hold over sybase, has not spawned the same kind of imaginative open source tools. I could be misinformed, but I just got 8i for my redhat 6.1 box here at home, and tools have been hard to come by.

    I will keep looking, and keep using sybase...
  • Me man, me programmer, don't use no stinking GUI tool. Good geek use VT100 terminal.

    shell>mysql -u geek -p geekpower
    mysql>use database;
    mysql>show tables;
    mysql>show columns from geek_table;
    mysql>select * from geek_table where desc = "Ode to my greatness";
    mysql>exit;
    shell>

    The other postings have given good suggestions, I'd keep looking at freshmeat.net, everynow and then something really good appears.

    As you can tell I prefer MySql. Unless you need stored proceedures or commit/rollback, I'd go with it. It's very robust and much faster than oracle.

    I've never found GUI tools to make me more productive, but if it works for you...
  • We're already working with the configuration of Intel Red Hat 6.0 on Intel, KDE, Oracle 8.1.5ee as the primary platform, then installed VMWare, and configured W98 and NT4sp4 server, in which we've installed SQL*Nav Dev2K, Des2K, SQLServer 7, etc. Only awkwardness is the triple key-press to get back into the Linux desktop. Everything on the one desktop, all of the tools, and the ability to have an entire network of servers and clients on the one keyboard.

    I would recommend although I haven't tried it here, 1 monitor per virtual desktop (think you'd need Metro-X to do that).

    Bill
  • This is kinda off the subject, but I've been wondering for a while how well ODBC is received in non-Microsoft arenas. I'm currently primarily a Windows developer (hopefully not forever!) and, of course, all the Microsoft propaganda claims ODBC is a well-supported industry standard. Is it? Do people who don't give a squat about Microsoft databases use it?
  • Uhhh... Isn't that like saying that wheels are obsolete because we have cars now?

    As far as I understand it, ADO calls OLE-DB which calls ODBC. (Or can, at least.)
  • Amen, bother!

    I do Sybase & Perl development all day. I'd scream if they took away my isql. I have yet to see a GUI tool that really would help me program better. There are some nice GUI admin tools, and I'm working on writing one msyelf, but for development, all I want is a command line I can barf SQL onto.
  • Or just get a dual CPU box and run VMWare so that you can run your Windows tools...
  • I'm in the same boat. Haven't had time to explore it, but odbc access might be your best bet. If oracle has odbc clients for linux, I have vague memories of a couple up and coming odbc systems for linux. If you could get that working, I think its possible hook up star office to the driver and use their spreadsheet stuff.

    Sorry I don't know more. Someday I'll have time to play with linux for fun again, dammit!!

  • We are doing our best to get ODBC available for Linux http://www.unixodbc.org, If Larry would just let us have the source for the his windows ODBC driver, we could get it going. (might even inprove it, it's not the best ODBC driver in the world :-)
  • This sounds like something Visio can do allready (altho just into MSAccess tables). It can allso reverse-engineer any ODBC-compliant database into an entity relationship diagram. Its at http://www.visio.com

  • You didn't mention specifically what type of Oracle development you do. Is it mainly on the server (i.e. writing stored procedures or other ddl stuff) or do you do client-side development(Developer2000, ODBC stuff)? Are you using java on the server ? Knowing what you're developing with now would make it much easier to answer your question.

    On the other hand, if ALL you need is a replacement for SQL*navigator, there are many utilities available, as mentioned in several of these posts.

  • I know this won't help immediately, but there may be some relief in sight. Since TOAD is written in Delphi, and Borland, according to most rumors, is working on a Delphi port to Linux, you may be in luck within a year. The backend compiler for Delphi and C++ is already identical.
  • If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.

    No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.

    [N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]

    Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.

    Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:

    http://bmerc-www.bu.edu/needle-doc/emacs/ [bu.edu].

    If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here [bu.edu]). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.

    ___
    DC

    P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here [photo.net] For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here [photo.net].
  • I use Sybase db's and I guess I've been spoiled with the Java edition of Sybase's SQL Central for over a year now. I suppose you could use it to admin Oracle dbs as well, given the appropriate JDBC drivers. I'm shocked to find out that Oracle hasn't provided the same for its developers yet. Sybase's EAStudio will be out for Linux shortly, and it's chock full of db tools (including Java and pure HTML Datawindow builders) you can use with any db.
  • I guess that this might not be exactly to your taste if you want a GUI tool:
    I do a lot of oracle stuff on Linux and I run sqlplus in an emacs shell session.
    This allows me to use emacs command history and editing, making sqlplus a truly interactive tool.

    Yes I still have to remember all the sql commands.
    But that can be a good thing, and if you have Oracle, you also will have SQL*PLUS, and emacs is more likely available than some GUI tool.
  • Check out DBInspector [dbinspector.com].

    It is a Java app that uses JDBC to connect to the db.

    Caveats:

    • It's not open source (hint, hint)
    • It's still somewhat rough.

    It's not great, but it's a million times easier to use than sqlplus!

  • As a relative novice to the world of Oracle DBAdom SQL Navigator has been my #1 tool for administration. I have tried some of the linux apps (including the ones mentioned so far) and I havent found any remotely close to the functionality of sql nav. The perfect tool in my eyes would combine all of the most used functions of sql nav with some of the handy linux apps I've found (eg. sessionmon) all under one roof. I admittadley dont have the remotest idea of how to build one myself, but damn it would be handy.
  • Yeah, what a cretin. He only gave a link to a bunch of tools for the guy to check out along with a ton of other information. How stupid, how cruel.
  • One free alternative would be to write some custom scripts in Perl using the excellent CGI and DBI modules along with modperl for apache. I just cobbled together something for my site in ~2 nights that allows me to display contents of tables, delete entries and edit and update entries. Not too much work and kinda fun. Another alternative would be to buy vmware [vmware.com] and run NT on top of Linux so that you could use NT Oracle tools. I have been using VMWare for a few months now, and if your computer is hefty enough (>=P2 233, >=96MB RAM) it runs NT (and all Win32 apps) quite well.
  • I have been using Oracle for years. I won't run Oracle on NT becuase NT is not reliable enough. NT services; screw that man. But I use NT for a workstation because that works fine and there are dozens of applications I can't have if I don't use Win32. Oracle releases their clients on Win32: Desinger-- I use it every day Enterprise Manager -- I use it every day (that includes about a dozen tools) TOAD -- That is my coding environment. (toadsoft.com) The solution is to pony up spare change and use 2 machines if you are a serious oracle developer. Use one (linux) with a few cheap IDE drives for Oracle and use the other for your dev work. That way you have the best of both fuding sides. The Oracle client is a web server or a Win32 box-- for today anyhow.
  • Check out http://www.quest.com for a product called TOAD... Tool for Oracle Developers... I've found it to be invaluable....
  • I personally prefer SQL Worksheet. It comes with Enterprise Manager, and allows you to do *almost* everything you can do in SQL*Plus. Some of the SQL*Plus commands (i.e. Set) aren't supported for some strange reason, but you get a command history and point-and-click editing of your SQL. I use it every day, and have given up on SQL*Plus.

  • One Word (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Orac http://www.kkitts.com/ Also check out Matt's House http://www.mattshouse.com

  • sqlplus (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The beauty of Oracle is that a GUI is not required. I don't understand where they would even be useful unless you were new to Oracle.

    Given, sqlplus is not nearly as friendly to use as MySQL's command line client, but it gets the job done.

    If you are an Oracle developer by trade, you should really learn to use the command line interface effectively. GUI's have a short life-cyle. This means that you will have to re-learn how to interface with them over and over agian as time goes on. The command line interface is much more static. It may take longer to learn, but it will pay off in the end.

  • Hip Hip Hooray!
    VMWare is REALLY cool. I'd suggest it to anyone who was even thinking of running an X Server on a windows box (like I used to).

  • The gentle reader should head back five years.

    Back then, Microsoft had decided that they were going to force the solution to all problems to be Windows NT.

    They had to create tools to try to make NT fit the problems people try to solve using computers.

    If they had looked at things the way you are, they should have concluded:

    "Oh, NT isn't really the right solution. No point to even bothering to try to "make it fit."

    That's obviously not what has happened. Instead, NT is being billed as the ideal solution to all sorts of problems, with attempts made to make problems fit NT.

    If that isn't sad, then, by he very same argument, it is silly to regard attempts to make Linux useful as "sad."

    If it is sad to try to make Linux and/or problems fit one another, then it is vastly more sad that Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars doing precisely the same thing.

  • You're referring to Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project [perl.com].

    On related note, ActivePerl (Perl for Win32) 5.6, which is due out next month will have support for fork(), so one of the biggest portability hurdles in moving your scripts from Unix to Win32 should disappear.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • If he doesn't want to keep a Windows box (like he is short of desk space) I wonder what the likelyhood that any of these Windows-only tools will run under Wine?

    Otherwise another option might be Bochs or VMware (which a number of other people have suggested).

  • Since TOAD is written in Delphi, and Borland, according to most rumors, is working on a Delphi port to Linux,

    Borland has since said that their Linux RAD tool is not Delphi, not C++Builder, but a new product, with a new class library. Thus, it will not be source compatible with Delphi or C++Builder. Or so Borland says.
  • Hello,

    My name is Matthew Chappee, and I'm the author of the Oracle Application Suite for Linux. It has been referenced in this discussion several times (usually just by address' oracle.mattshouse.com or www.mattshouse.com). There have been a lot of good ideas thrown around in this forum. I propose that we organize these nuggets so that we can address them in an organized manner. I'm actively developing my suite [mattshouse.com] of applications, and am always looking for cool ideas. So, please CC me at matthew@mattshouse.com [mailto] with your ideas, and we can start discussing the options on my mailing list [mattshouse.com].

    Thanks,

  • Kora (Score:2)

    by thuss ( 24408 )
    I use Kora and it's not bad...

    http://members.xoom.com/uwagner/kora/

    --

  • Although it make take a little work, and might be considered by your co-workers as overkill, perhaps you should consider building your own management/SQL-builder/whatever tool. If you know some Perl, you can use DBI and the Oracle DBD, possibly along with Tk, to build a pretty slick interface that will perform well and do almost everything you should need it to do. Throw in GD, ImageMagick, or GIFgraph to generate some on-the-fly images to impress your boss and co-workers (they're very fast once you load them into memory), and you have the beginnings of a wonderful tool.

    I'm operating on the assumption that you know exactly what you need the tool to do, since that's what it sounds like. This should be a pretty simple task (although possibly time-consuming) for someone who knows SQL and Perl.

    Just a thought.

    darren

  • Found these on freshmeat.. They look pretty neat..

    http://oracle.mattshouse.com [mattshouse.com]
    http://www.oracletool.com [oracletool.com]
  • There are a few development tools that I really couldn't do without, and I have to say that Embarcadero DBArtisan & Schema Manager for Oracle (or MSSQL, etc.) are among them. They're expensive (over $1000 for the set) but I've found them invaluable. Here are the two most valuable features I would have to see before I'd switch:

    1) You can make a series of interactive changes to a table schema and then have it figure out the minimal SQL to do it. If it can't be done with an Oracle primitive (e.g. renaming a column, reordering columns, changing column type) it generates all the SQL to drop/disable all dependent objects, constraints, rename the old table, create a new table, transfer the data, recreate all the dependent objects, etc.

    2) It can do a diff of two database schemas, or of a database schema against a historical archive and generate SQL you can use to perform the delta. This is incredibly useful.

    And there are a number of other features that make managing a monster like Oracle a lot easier. Perhaps it will eventually run adequately under WINE. I'm not saying this to promote the product, but to point out some useful features that go beyond just executing a query and seeing the results, and to get people thinking about what it is you actually do when managing a complex database. And maybe there is a more open/portable too out there to do this. (Though it's saved me enough time that I don't begrudge them their dollars - they're smart programmers, and they've done a good job.)
  • I use MySql, and for a while now I've been using a very nice database utility called phpMyAdmin. It runs on PHP. It was created by someone in Italy, I think, and is available from www.phpwizard.net [phpwizard.net]. It has worked great for my needs, providing a convenient web-based interface for creating, modifying, and dropping tables, inserting records, and running SQL queries.


    At the moment, though, it is only available for MySql and PostgreSQL as far as I know. But since you it comes as PHP source code, and PHP supports Oracle, you should be able to get it to work without too much difficulty. Of course, you would need to write your own code to support the more advanced Oracle features (like foreign keys) that MySQL doesn't have. But if you do decide to build your own interface, I would recommend this as a good place to start.
  • This is a java tool I came across while
    looking for something else. I bookmarked it,
    but I've never tried it:

    http://www.pureit.se/products/dbvis/index.html
  • Alan Burlison wrote a tool called explain. It's written in perl, and uses DBI, DBD::Oracle, and Tcl. It comes with DBD::Oracle, so once you have that installed, do perldoc ora_explain. Check out DB_Browser (http://www.summersault.com/software/db_browser/) by Chris Hardie, dbMan (http://www.fi.muni.cz/~sorm/dbman/screenshots.htm l) by Milan Sorm, Java Database Explorer (http://www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/1620/jexplore r.html) by Bernard Van Haecke and DBUI (http://tegan.deltanet.com/~phlip/DBUIdoc.html) as well. If you're looking for other tools that work on Linux to manage Oracle databases, Karma (http://www.panix.com/~shull/karma) by Sean Hull, Orac (http://www.kkitts.com/orac-dba) by Andy Duncan, oracletool (http://www.vonnieda.com/oracletool) Adam vonNieda, AlertView (http://www.zephrus.com/html/products.html) by Zephrus Software, as well as the other various tools mentioned on this ask slashdot forum.

  • oracletool.pl (Score:3)

    by jabbo ( 860 ) <jabbo AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:14AM (#1593916)
    This thing is a tool of the gods. You need to be reasonably comfortable with Oracle and (somewhat) with Perl, but DAMN is it fly. About the only thing it won't let you do really easily is get the query planner to barf up its plan, but that could probably be hacked in easily.

    http://www.oracletool.com/ [oracletool.com]

    Yeah, it's free as in speech and beer, too.

    There's something called "Orac" as well, but it's in Perl/Tk rather than with a web interface, so I prefer the oracletool, myself. Simple to use, even NT people grasp it immediately.

    Good stuff!

  • The thing about the "pretty tools" (moving on up to things as sophisticated as ERWIN) is that they permit you to do the data modelling without writing any code. No Java needed. No Perl needed. Nothing needed.

    I have no problem agreeing that there will be a point in time at which it will prove necessary to start coding; the point is that there are portions of the system where it is downright invaluable to have purely declarative definitions, which means that you've got a set of code on which you can unleash analysis tools that don't need to worry about the Turing-completeness of a full-scale language like Perl, PL/SQL, or Java.

    It would be, for instance, a very interesting idea to compose ER diagrams using a diagramming tool like Dia. [lysator.liu.se] Dia generates output in the form of XML. [hex.net]

    The really cool next step would be to take that XML and use it to generate the DDL code to generate the relevant tables, so that the diagrams represent not only instructive diagrams for communicating information about the design, but actually the code to define the declarative parts of the system.

    (Note: ERWIN has the ability to do this sort of thing, permitting one to both generate table definition code from the diagram as well as to generate a diagram based on SQL DDL code...)

  • SQL Dev't Environments (Score:3)

    by MattyG ( 6408 ) on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:11AM (#1593918)
    Sadly, it seems like most of the strong Oracle development tools are Windows only - cases in point:

    Golden, PL/Edit, http://www.benthicsoftware.com/ [benthicsoftware.com]

    and

    TOAD, the Tool for Oracle Application Developers, http://www.toadsoft.com/ [toadsoft.com].

    If you can, keep a windows box to run these and your applications and just hit the server running on Linux, over SQL*Net.

    -matt
    ---
    Wha? TV & Movie Theme Songs? Oh yeah....

  • Check on Freshmeat.net (Score:3)

    by SoftwareJanitor ( 15983 ) on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:30AM (#1593919)
    I punched 'oracle' into the search box on freshmeat.net and got back a whole slew of hits, several of which sound like possibilities for what this guy is asking for, and probably a few others that might be other interesting tools for him to look at.

  • Maybe a dumb question. (Score:3)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:16AM (#1593920) Homepage Journal
    Can't you use most management tools to manage a database over the network? Why not keep an NT workstation around to run the admin tools you can't get, while your database sits on Linux?

  • A couple of tips (Score:4)

    by tweek ( 18111 ) on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:21AM (#1593921) Homepage Journal
    First of join the Oracle-LINUX mailing list.

    Send email to ListGuru@fatcity.com
    In the body put SUBSCRIBE ORACLE-LINUX-L

    Many a great discussion happens on this list. It does generate a TON of traffic though.

    A good repository of tools is available at
    here [mattshouse.com]


    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece

  • Great question... (Score:4)

    by nlh ( 80031 ) on Friday October 22, 1999 @11:25AM (#1593922) Homepage

    I've been waiting for a discussion about this topic to pop up, so I'm happy to add my few cents.

    I'm currently working on a web development project (using Oracle 8.0.5) with some folks and we're using Linux as the development enviornment. I've not actually ever used NT for this sort of thing, so I'm not familiar with the joys of SQL Navigator (for better or for worse).

    In scouring the pages of freshmeat and other sources, the best tool I've found is called dbMan [fi.muni.cz]. It's based on Perl, Tk, and DBI interfaces and works quite well for some purposes.

    Currently, the version I have (0.0.9pre1) lets you browse and modify tables and table data in a spreadsheet-like interface (adding new rows doesn't seem to work perfectly), run command line SQL queries with command history, and do some basic import-export functions. (check the website for more details.)

    I am very interested, however, as to what other people use and if there's anything a bit more hard core than dbMan.

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