Friday, February 10, 2006

Initial Impressions on Raptor

I'm a PL/SQL Developer guy, no question about it. It gives me the ability to write code pretty quickly and the debugger is second to none. I'm also a Unix guy. I've been running Linux at home for about three years and Solaris is the only desktop I've ever had at work. In order to run PL/SQL Developer I'd either have to use a Windows emulator or a Sun PCI card (PC on a Sun).

Until now.

Oracle's Project Raptor is quite a tool. I installed Project Raptor on my desktop at work this week and I'm hooked. The interface is a little awkward and there's a couple things I don't like about it, but it's definitely a great query tool. I've only looked at the query editor this week (and I haven't totally read the docs yet), but here are my impressions:

  • Pointer control isn't quite there yet. Sometimes my pointer turns to a text tool when clicking on a menu item. Sometimes it's an arrow when it was supposed to be a text tool. Sometimes it just wasn't there.
  • Lots of java exceptions.
  • The explain plan tool is neat once you figure out how to use it.
  • When you run the query, it retrieves the whole resultset. It would be nice to retrieve a subset and let you page through the results. Sure, I know about ROWNUM, but I just expect that automatically.
  • When you retrieve a resultset, the columns always come back too small. You have to expand them almost every time.
  • Most query tools will display a date as a date if the time component is the default time and the entire timestamp if not. In SQL*Plus fashion, the dates show up in NLS_DATE_FORMAT. No biggie, just different.
  • I want to see the tables I have permission on under "Tables", not "Other Users>Tables".
  • Forget about using OS Authenticated users, it uses JDBC Thin.
I know, some pretty nitpicky stuff. Overall, though, I like the query tool and I am using it almost exclusively.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes raptor certainly looks like it has a lot of potential for PLSQL work and general sql querying and (perhaps) editing data. We are licensed for Toad currently ( and I am not giving up my copy yet -- probably not for a long time ) but I can see the potential for many of our developers. It's an interesting choice of names for raptor eh?

Anonymous said...

Yea, I'm like'n Raptor, I don't think it's as "robust" as Toad but, for doing simple things like tuning code and seeing what it does via the explain plan right on the fly is sweet