
If you are working with Oracle applications databases at work or even during your studies you will know something for sure, dealing with SQL*Plus is a nightmare and sooner you will realize its not a productive tool for developers nor administrators. So, most developers use TOAD which is incredibly smart, easy to use and double your productivity with exports option, history, table structure views and much more. Today, I tried googling for the oracle tools and I stumbled upon this new Oracle SQL Developer which was released sometime during this year.
I've been using it all day in the morning and it is very interesting. first of all, its FREE and you can do exactly the things you can do with a TOAD only that with Oracle SQL Developer you are using Oracle product! I noticed though it retrieves data a but slower than TOAD but I assume it was something to do with me using a virtual machine at that moment. The beautiful part, it is a cross platform in the sense you can run it on your windows, mac or even linux desktop as long as you have java runtime environment.