I’ve been using Oracle SQL Developer I think since the very first initial betas.  I could never stand the TOAD interface and the few bugs I encountered with SQL Developer were never bothersome enough to stop using the tool.

Over the years SQL Developer has matured very nicely and now is very stable and feature rich.

When someone from Packt contacted me and let me know there was a book on the way I was very excited.  Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 by Sue Harper covers the latest release for SQL Developer – 2.1.  This release brought a lot of stability to the project and also introduced the new Data Modeler from Oracle.

I’ve been skimming through the book for the last week or so.  I honestly thought since I’ve been using SQL Developer for so long there would be very little new to me in the book but I’ve been pleasantly surprised and have picked up a lot of small tips that have helped me work smarter and more efficiently with SQL Developer.

The book covers quite a bit:

• Install, configure, customize, and manage your SQL Developer environment
• Includes the latest features to enhance productivity and simplify database development
• Covers reporting, testing, and debugging concepts
• Meet the new powerful Data Modeling tool – Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Detailed code examples and screenshots for easy learning

A few useful tips I’ve picked up since reading the book have been:

• The ability to highlight and filter data in the grids.  This is really useful when you are trying to dig through some complicated data looking for very particular information.
• Using bind variables in the worksheet.
• The code formatter – cleaning up my mess!

What else does the book cover?   There are chapters devoted to PL/SQL, dubugging and tuning, extending SQL Developer, source control integration (using Subversion) and a large chapter on the Data Modeler which I’m just waiting for a new project to start to begin exploring that particular tool.

If you are just getting started using SQL Developer I’d highly recommend the book.  It will get you up to speed quickly and seems useful as a quick reference.   If you are an experienced SQL Developer user I still think the added section on the new Data Modeler will be quite useful.

ORA-12638 credential retrieval failed

Everything was working yesterday!  I restarted Oracle and my workstation – no luck!  Argh.

A quick Google however turned up a simple solution – simply modify your sqlnet.ora file. On my machine running Oracle XE this is located:

C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\NETWORK\ADMIN

And change one line:

Original Entry – SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NTS)
Modified Entry – SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES= (NONE)

After I changed this I tried it and it worked – no reboot, restart required!  Reading on the Oracle forums – apparently the “NTS” option tries to use your Windows credentials to authenticate with Oracle.  So unless your Oracle logins match your Windows login – this may fail.

That is now about to change as Oracle has released an Early Adopter Release of SQL Developer Data Modeling.  This is currently a standalone product but Oracle has said at some point it will be integrated with SQL Developer.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeling is the latest product offering to join the Oracle Database Tools. SQL Developer Data Modeling offers a full spectrum of data and database modeling tools and utilities, including Entity Relationship modeling, Relational (Database Design), Data Type and Multidimensional modeling, full forward and reverse engineering and code generation. It includes importing from and exporting to a variety of sources and targets, provides a variety of formatting options and validates the models through a predefined set of Design Rules.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeling

• Browse, edit, create database models using a Graphical User Interface
• Import from a script file or Oracle, IBM mainframe DB2, IBM DB2/UDB, Microsoft SQL Server and ODBC/JDBC database catalogs
• Import multidimensional Cube Views metadata and XMLA
• Import existing models from other modeling tools like CA ERwin® Data Modeler, Oracle Designer
• Printing facilities
• Synchronized forward and reverse engineering between Logical and Relational models
• Model compare and merge facilities
• Extensive formatting options and support for subviews
• Run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

Oracle already has a lot of documentation, tutorials and a FAQ online at the Data Modeling site.  If you are currently using SQL Developer I’d give it a try – even as an early release I’ve had good luck creating basic ERDs so far.

I dug around on the web looking for an Oracle friendly ERD (entity-relationship diagram) tool. There were lots out there but most were in the $300+ range. The few free ones I found were limited in some way, no printing, no saving, etc. Finally I stumbled upon a Google Groups post that mentioned that JDeveloper would do this. I had heard of JDeveloper but for some reason always assumed it was a commercial product. A quick check on the Oracle site however proved me wrong. JDeveloper is a free download! (free since 2005!)

Oracle JDeveloper is a free integrated development environment with end-to-end support for modeling, developing, debugging, optimizing, and deploying Java applications and Web services.

It’s a huge download, 500MB for the whole package. Installation was just a matter of unzipping the download. After watching a brief tutorial I was quickly able to connect to, and reverse engineer my database into a beautiful diagram. It will also generate DDL scripts from a diagram. I haven’t dug into it much and probably won’t use it for more than generating my ERDs but it also appears it will do UML as well which I have been meaning to check out.

After I dug around I found what seems to be the solution on the SQL Developer Forum.

Turns out there may be an issue with the JDBC drivers shipping with the latest SQL Developer. The ‘fix’ is to copy two .jar files from your 10g client install to the SQL Developer directories.

On my machine I copied these two files from my Oracle installation:

C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14.jar
C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14dms.jar

To SQL Developer:

C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14.jar
C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14dms.jar

Overwriting the existing files.

While this isn’t an official fix – it worked for me as well as others on the forum.

FWIW – SQL Developer can also connect to MSSQL, MySQL and Access and it’s free!