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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I wanted to know about this since a long time. Other vendors are coming out with intuitive IDEs with even more flexibility to developers and DBAs, whereas we rely on Toad and other third-party IDEs to work with Oracle.

Why they are sticking to command-line black dump screen?

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5 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I believe the biggest reason is to do with Oracle's past and range of supported platforms. The command line was the lowest common denominator. So with all of systems setup, configuration and administration being available as SQL statements has made it a very flexible solution.

Using GUI tools such as toad or enterprise manager, do make administration easier, but as you can see from the show SQL buttons you do get to see exactly what will be executed on the DBMS.

I do appreciate knowing a lot of these commands does take time and effort but they are worth it. As they have on occasion been the only way recover a database instance after parts of the environment have failed and prevent them from being run

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See the GUI of PostgreSQL. What every you do with GUI, it displays the actual command below. – RPK Nov 3 '10 at 6:25
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It's Standard

Same reason every piece of SQL documentation lists tables as if you were working on the command line. You also can't cater to one particular IDE.

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No need to shout? :S – Peter Boughton Nov 2 '10 at 15:16
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@Peter: Emphasizing a point, not shouting. ;) – Josh K Nov 2 '10 at 15:39
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That's what <em> and/or <strong> are for - a 170% sized H1 is too big, and should be reserved for answers that actually have a use for (multiple) headers. – Peter Boughton Nov 2 '10 at 15:43
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@Peter: Or it could be used (as I often do) to quickly summarize the point of the answer. – Josh K Nov 2 '10 at 15:54
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Regardless of the continued presence of the command line, it doesn't answer the OP's question. He's asking "where's the ide", not "why not get rid of the command line" – MIA Nov 3 '10 at 4:10
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The Command Line is the most powerful tool there is and is portable to all systems supported by Oracle.

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I wish they would add some simple features to it, like command history and editing. After switching from Postgres to Oracle, it was like stepping back in time 20 years. – KeithB Nov 2 '10 at 21:30
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Fine. Why haven't they come out with a decent command-line tool either? And don't tell me SQL*Plus fits the bill either. – Jason Baker Nov 3 '10 at 8:47
@Jason, SQL*Plus fits the bill. – user1249 Nov 3 '10 at 11:53
up vote 1 down vote

They've had management GUIs going back at least to v8 that I know of. They have universally been horrid. They have also been subject to dramatic change version to version last time I bothered to keep up. Simple fact is that while their customers are willing to keep buying tools such as Toad, Oracle has little incentive to put much money into building their own. No one makes a decision to use Oracle because of their tooling. They use Oracle RDBMS because of the engine.

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Oracle is a very stable and mature RDBMS and people love it in spite of it's unnecessary complexity (in some areas). It is one of highly recommended RDBMS in banks. But they never thought from either the developer or a DBA point of view. I am not biased. The command line and poor GUIs sometimes appear to be written by college beginners under any Oracle guy's supervision. The core engine though is written by matured ones. – RPK Nov 3 '10 at 6:28
up vote 0 down vote

Oracle SQL Developer has been available for about 5 years now but it sucks and almost nobody uses it.

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Oracle's front-end tools have always sucked. Remember the old SQL/PLSQL window in the era of Oracle 8. If you by mistake, pressed ENTER, there was no way to go to the previous line. – RPK Nov 3 '10 at 6:23
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It has gotten much better over the years. I prefer it to TOAD. – Joeri Sebrechts Nov 3 '10 at 10:30

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