Poll on favorite Oracle Dev/Tuning tools

[roadwarriorDBA]

I have a few days to evaluate Oracle tools that either assist DBA's in Tuning or Assist PL/SQL developers in coding - or both.

I prefer SQLNavigator but have not looked at the newer versions in a while. Its primarily for development but you can explain plan. I have not used Oracle Designer nor Embarcadero Studio.

I will be checking them all out and interviewing my team for feedback.

If you have experince pro or con on any of these please post it here.
Basically this is my chance to buy what will help us out going forward on 10g.

1 - SQLNavigator
2 - Oracle Designer
3 - Embarcadero Studio
4 ?? other ??

Thanks

[rbs100]

Why dont you check out for spotlight and Oracle Enterprise Manager's performance pack?

[hacketta1]

http://www.hotsos.com/products/profiler.html

[TimHall]

Hi.

Developement:
JDeveloper is now free and it allows you to code and debug PL/SQL.

There is a free version of TOAD, it doesn't have a debugger like the one you buy, but it has lots of other bells an whistles.

PL/SQL Developer is a neat tool, not too cluttered.

SQLdetective seems to have a lot going for it.

DBA:
Use statspack (or AWR and ADDM in 10g). Maybe OEM depending on your version. You could by the tuning and diagnostics packs if you're desperate to spend money

Every other tool I've used I found issues with. I was recently trialing Spotlight on Oracle and noticed a couple of issues. It used too much CPU to monitor the database and it was not totally 10g complient. The summary values omitted events that were renamed in 10g, making system performance seem better than it actually was.

Personal opinion:
Keep it simple. AWR/ADDM/Statspack provide masses of information. Getting to grips with these utilities means you'll be able to tune the database without relying on expensive 3rd party tools that may not be accurate for your verson.

Instrument your PL/SQL properly and you don't need IDEs and debuggers, you can get by in a text editor and SQL*Plus.

I know I sound old school, but I keep trying products out and for a few weeks I think it's solved all my problems, only to find the tool is flawed, or it's caused a whole bunch of new problems. I invariably come back to the basics.

Each to their own

Cheers

Tim...

[roadwarriorDBA]

Thanks all, and Tim that may be the best strategy.

[tamilselvan]

I fully agree with Tim.

I never used a 3rd party tool for solving performance issues.
In my opinion, tkprof is still the best tool.
No 3rd party tool comes closer to tkprof.

Tamil

[jodie]

DBArtisan (Embarcadero) is a nice Admin tool... specially if you have to monitor other DBs (SQLServer, UDB, etc). It doesn't do performance tuning, but it's nice to have your scripts on different tabs, and have the output in a grid.

I use it every day for generic tasks.

[marist89]

For PL/SQL development, definitely PL/SQL Developer.