Most third generation language (3GL) IDEs have trained hackers like me to expect the tool to write some of the code for them. Regular internet folks are already used to having search terms and URLs auto-completed in their browsers. I don’t want to get into a debate over whether this makes us lazier AND dumber, but I DO want to give you a quick overview of what SQL Developer can do in this area.

If you fall in the NOTEPAD – ‘do not put anything into the editor which I do not type myself’ camp, then I feel sorry for you. But also, rest assured that you can disable this feature in SQL Developer.

Turn it off, turn it off!

SQLDev can ‘think’ for you…

Love how it offers JOINS for me too!

…or SQLDev can ‘remember’ for you

auto-complete based on previous work

This is a REALLY nice touch and isn’t something I’ve seen in other database IDEs before. Let’s pretend that you have a database that is ‘missing’ foreign keys – crazy, I know. Instead of having to type out your joins manually, it’s nice that SQLDev can complete those for you now. So you type the join once and only once. The developer wins!

It’s all in the wrist

This is very subtle, and it took me a while to figure it out. What you see will depend on when you rest the keyboard and where. If I type ‘SELECT…WHERE’ and stop, I’ll see history items. If I type the same thing and add a SPACE after the WHERE, I’ll get the regular parsing and guessing what you want next items. If you can’t get the popup to ‘pop up’ when you want it to, you can always ask for it manually with the keyboard shortcut.

Ctrl + Space to get your insight to popup 'on demand'