S1dd - My Other Blog..

If you search for Oracle GUI Clients in Google, you turn up with nothing. After some more hunting, I found TOAD. I have been using the Free version of TOAD for a few weeks now but it is very annoying and has to be updated often. Also it can only make one connection at a time. The price of the full version > 800$!!
That’s an outrage, especially for us MySQL folks who can get SQLYog for free (which works perfectly well in Linux with wine).

A few days back I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a new computer at work and was hunting for an Oracle client and I found TOra, an open source Oracle Client. I still haven’t got it connecting to Oracle from Ubuntu and the Windows version won’t even run. Hunting for ways to make it work, I found SQL Developer - which is made by Oracle themselves and is free. If only Oracle would have mentioned this on the download page for InstantClient, it would have saved me a few hours of searching, tinkering and complaining about a lack of choice in Oracle clients.

SQLDeveloper is a cross platform Java Oracle client and it is free and does everything that TOAD does as far as I can tell. No more TOAD for me.

Concat:

Most of the database queries I run at some point are used to generate HTML and rather than go through the results of the query and add HTML to it in PHP or Ruby code, I like to get this out of the query itself.
So in MySQL my queries often look like this:

select concat(’<a href=pagename.php?varid=”‘, varname, ‘”>’, varid, ‘</a>’) as varlink, …..

However for the same result in Oracle, which only allows two items in the concat function,
this turns into:

select concat(’<a href=pagename.php?varid=”‘, concat(varname, concat(’”>’, concat(varid, ‘</a>’)))) as varlink, …..

If there are multiple such items, the query becomes extremely ugly with too many brackets to keep track of.

Magic Quotes:

My next complaint about Oracle is no magic quotes - string values must be in single quotes, no double quotes allowed.