SQL developer is a reasonable choice, if your team is not performance-critical.
June 28, 2018
SQL developer is a reasonable choice, if your team is not performance-critical.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle SQL Developer
My company is a non-profit based healthcare system consists of hospitals and clinics. We have an electronic health record system that is used by our clinicians and captures and stores clinical data. Our projects are to analyze care providers' utilization of our computer system, to understand user behaviors and patterns. We used SQL developer to develop ETL processes and extract data for analysis.
- SQL developer is a popular tool and provided free. This means we could find a good analyst and data developer easily since many of them are already familiar with the tool. It is also good to educate our developers and analysts to follow up with new features of the tool.
- SQL developer runs upon Java. It is easy to install and set up to get started with the first SQL. My organization is in healthcare industry and we don't need "everything in one" tool. Comparing to Toad, SQL developer is light and use less memory, for us, it is a reasonable choice.
- SQL developer is more specialized in individual developer's use rather than collaborative database development. In our project, individual clinical analysts have their own data mart to run and analyze, which was better fit to do the project with SQL developer.
- We often used the functionality of exporting data to files, such as Excel cvs or text to be used as a secondary analysis. In case the file size is big it used to fail or even crash the application. And it ended up with failure of the whole export. I wish SQL developer provide a step by step export, or at least show estimate of exported file size in advance.
- There is little support of code quality management, maintenance, and assessment. Since our data analysts often works in silo environment we need a centralized code management to keep consistency of data, which SQL developer is not good at.
- Performance is good overall, there are tools for improvement to be used in a professional manner, especially to work for a large data set such as enterprise data warehouse.
- Overall ROI of using SQL developer is good, as it doesn't cost any dollar to install and use the product.
- Depending on the level of data developers and analysts, a code maintenance is required additionally, but it is not directly related to SQL developer.
- Since SQL developer lacks automation, some developers use other database IDE tools such as TOAD separately or additionally, based on their personal preferences. We paid for such licenses. It is still a good way of saving budget to use SQL developer as a baseline tool and commercial tools for optional, but using one more tool sometimes cause code inconsistency problem.
Toad and SQL developer are often compared and we considered both at the beginning. Arguably, Toad outperforms SQL developer in terms of many functionalities. The biggest reason we encouraged our engineers to use SQL developer was cost. Although it is not enriched like Toad, it is still a very well functioning and supported product.