Toad Extension for Eclipse and the burden of using SQL Developer

I am not a huge fan of DB specific and DB oriented development. For years now I have been participating in projects using different systems like MySQL, Ingress, SQLServer and of course Oracle. The last one one (Oracle) seems to be dominating in these recent years in most of the projects I _ve seen. When it comes to interfacing with the DB most of the times I use the famous SQL Developer, from Oracle. For the type of work I do with the DB, most of the time just querying the DB during development and bug searching rather than doing real development on it - I want a good SQL editor, with code completion and session management.

I have tried many clients but at the end I was just downloading SQL developer and that was it. The thing is that I really don't like SQL Developer, is slow, bulky, it almost never manages to shut down properly on a Mac and feels like a Java Application .of the 90s. On the other hand it is simple enough in terms of interface, gives me this simple SQL tab and I just run my queries or examine the table's meta-data.

Yesterday I was reading t his article at the JavaCodeGeeks Site, regarding DB related tools for developers. In the list of suggested tools, I discovered that Toad,(another known and proven tool, especially for Oracle Use) has a community edition as an Eclipse plugin. It is free as well. I have used Toad in the past, it is like what SQL Developer should be like in term of performance (but sometimes a bit bloated with features for my developer taste).

Anyway, I though I would give a try and install on my Eclipse Indigo. So, it is not bad at all. It takes a bit to initialize in the start (depending on your oracle version or driver I suppose) and fetch any related metadata - but for my taste and daily work requirements, offers the very same features, simple SQL tab, simple table metadata browsing and session management. I think I am going to keep using it for a while see how it goes, especially on memory consumption as an Eclipse plugin.

It is for sure easier to just switch tabs from your Java coding tab to Toad Tab, rather working with another bulky app.

Let's see.