SQLdetective Review

 

I was recently asked to review a product called SQLdetective, so here it is.

Q. What’s it for?
A. It’s for developers and DBAs and anyone else who does anything with an Oracle database.

Q. What features does it have?
A. It has everything you’ve come to expect from a general purpose DBA/Developer IDE. I’m not even going to attempt to list them because it would take forever. Suffice to say, if you’ve seen it in another product, it’s probably here.

Q. What’s it look like?
A. You can look at a bunch of screen shots here. Like most current IDEs it’s a bit busy. Not as plain as PL/SQL Developer, but not as busy as TOAD. The icons are “different”, but I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Q. What’s it feel like?
A. I seems quite quick and responsive, but it does some odd things, like when you highlight a table in the navigator the default operation is to show you a page of data. I doubt this would be the first thing I would want to see.

Q. What’s it cost?
A. The basic price is US$99, but if you want all the add-on modules it’s going to cost a total of US$198. So the cost depends on what you need. It’s difficult to compare prices because you rarely have to pay list prices and each IDE has different optional modules. It’s more expensive than the free version of TOAD, and now JDeveloper is free you can do all your PL/SQL development and debugging using that if you’ve got the hardware to run it 🙂

Q. Tim, would you buy it?
A. If I was forced to use an IDE I would use TOAD or JDeveloper for free. I have both loaded on my PC and I never use them. If I was forced to buy a license for an IDE I would consider this product. My company recently bought licenses for PL/SQL Developer, but I still use a text editor and SQL*Plus 🙂

Conclusion:

If you really want to pay money for an IDE give this one a try. It’s got a lot of stuff in it. Alternatively, write good intrumented code and save yourself the cash.

I guess I could just copy and paste this review about almost any of the current IDEs, but at least I’ve kept my promise…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

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