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Comment by greyboy | Hacker News Reader

Oracle actually maintains it's own Java cross platform application that many of my coworkers use all day, every day (I use it periodically for some very handy features) - SQL Developer. It's actually quite responsive and usable considering.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-develo...

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I use it daily too on my Mac and its usability is pretty bad. Copy and paste sorta work, but I can never remember when to use cntl-c versus apple-c in this app. The UI is hideous and very un-Mac like. It also doesn't seem to handle network disconnects very well, oftentimes requiring a Force-Quit if I've switched from wired to wireless networking.

That being said, I still use it because I haven't found anything else free that I like. I suppose if I use a tool every day like this one, I should pay to find one that works better.

I'll concede, it isn't perfect and has quite a few quirks, which I can mostly avoid now. However, in my use case some features outweigh the inconveniences (i.e. exporting data). And it's free while all the alternatives I'm looked at aren't.

Except [on Windows, where I use it] it eats about 600Mb of RAM just sitting there doing nothing with all connections closed. Start opening a bunch of tabs and DB connections and you can easily push it into the 1Gb RAM range and it crawls.

Combo it with JDeveloper and a local instance of Weblogic, and you can pretty easily eat up 3Gb of RAM just opening up the standard set of Oracle dev tools.

It's absolutely astounding how long it takes to open, too. Woe to the person who clicks the SQL Developer icon, 20 seconds later still hasn't gotten any response indicating that the system "heard" the click, and then clicks again.

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