SQL Developer has had an object search for quite a while, however we decided it wasn’t good enough, so we enhanced it!

You can now search more things, and the search results are easier to work with.

Here’s a quick demo to see it live in action:

Oracle SQL Developer version 4.0, Find DB Object
Oracle SQL Developer version 4.0, Find DB Object

How it works

For your your connection, you’ll need to set a few search parameters, the SCHEMAs you want to look into, and then what you want to look for.

By default we search across every SCHEMA. If you uncheck, ‘All Schemas’ it will default to your login user schema.

After that, you need to decide if you want to look for objects of a given name, for their presence in PL/Scope, or to see if they’re mentioned in your database source code.

So if you’re looking for a reference to a VIEW in your PL/SQL source code, you would check the appropriate item in the ‘All Source Lines’ section of the tree. Note that in newer version of SQL Developer, we can now also search your VIEW and Materialized VIEW source as well as your defined RESTful Services.

Now for the ‘cool’ part – the results become a new object navigator. Click on an object in the search results to open it. If it’s a PL/SQL object, we’ll even place the cursor in the first line of the code that matches your search pattern.

Since I published this post, we also added two additional entry points for using the Search:

  1. main toolbar button (look for the binoculars)
  2. for Windows, ALT+G on text in a worksheet/code editor

Bonus Feature: Search History

We’ll remember your previous searches and search settings, as you start typing, you’ll see them pop-up if it matches something you’ve searched before.

Author

I'm a Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle. My mission is to help you and your company be more efficient with our database tools.

4 Comments

    • Paolo Marzucco

      Hi Jeff,
      is there a way to search for Last DDL date in V4?
      also showing it in the search results would be immensely useful when you are working in team on the same objects…

      Thanks,
      Paolo

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