This is a pretty old topic as far as SQL Developer goes. There are public articles going back to 2007 that show you how to extend the functionality in SQL Developer via SQL and XML. But I’m going to guess that for many of you that this is a new subject. Knowing that extensions exist versus being able to create one is an important distinction. I want this post to help you realize both! We’re…
I have a nasty habit of not thinking. I take something for granted or assume something for so long, that it corrupts my original learning or understanding of a concept. And then when someone calls me out, my first reaction is to defend my ‘shortcut’ thinking instead of re-evaluating my set of assumptions. So I’ve been working with data modeling software for almost 15 years and on a regular basis for the last 8 or…
Javadoc is a tool for generating API documentation in HTML format from doc comments in source code. Wouldn’t it be nice if a similar tool existed for PLSQL? Well you’re in luck because someone already made that available via an open-source utility known as pldoc. Automatically document your database schema with SQL Developer using the DB Doc feature. Generate HTML pages and allow your teams to click through the PLSQL source and tables without access…
This post is not a ‘How to Version Your Models’ tutorial. We have that in movie form in the Oracle Learning Library (OLL.) There’s a series of several 2-3 minute videos that step you through how to add a model to source control via Subversion, how to make changes, commit said changes, and how someone else can do a Check Out to see and continue your work. I want to concentrate on a small but…
I received a very interesting question from a reader the other day, which is awesome for two reasons. One, it gives me something to think about and play with. And ‘B’, it provides me with material for today’s blog post. So here’s the original question – We would like to capture inofmation like who, when and why a user connected to a database in production using SQL developer, so i was wondering if is it…
I was asked recently if SQL Developer supported multiple children reports. The answer is ‘yes’, and here is a post showing how to achieve this. First I need to clarify the answer a bit. Reports have a ‘master’ record set. These records can be used to ‘look up’ related records in a ‘detail’ set. This detail set becomes the ‘Child Report.’ A parent can have 1:Many children. However, children cannot be parents (at least not…
Debugging PLSQL is one of the primary features of Oracle SQL Developer. Yes, its the IDE for the database, but PLSQL is the database’s programming language. It really, really needs to support all things PLSQL. Programming languages need modern day amenities if they are to be adopted by mainstream developers. One of those amenities is a debugger. A primary challenge I face as an advocate for Oracle, PLSQL, and our developer tools is that database…
It helps to know the developers. They can tell you things that are not documented in the help or release notes. They mostly don’t hide things on purpose, mostly. They often build things into the application to aid themselves, but usually it’s for the end user’s benefit. @krisrice sent me over a few nuggets to share with you folks. These are truly ‘tricks.’ Cool things that you would not know about unless someone showed them…
So while hanging out with a bunch of co-workers last week, someone mentioned they had this trick. The challenge is knowing how many rows you have in your result set before you actually read them all. You see, Oracle has no way of telling us how many records are in our data set before we actually fetch the entire data set. Yes, Oracle gives us %ROWCOUNT, but that only tells us ‘…how many rows affected…
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong per se with SQL Developer’s tree control for navigating your connection objects. As a matter of fact there are a few things to really admire about the tree implementation. Just in case you have NO IDEA what I’m talking about, here is the tree in all its glory. Scrolling can get tedious on large databases. So here’s a few tips for those that are keyboard savvy: Navigate the tree…