There is always a great debate and confusion on choosing Client tool to connect Oracle database. People have their own opinion based on their ease and feasibility. With discussion with my friends and other DBAs and my own experience here are the list of tool with their merits and demerits
| Client Tool | Description |
| Oracle SQL Developer | Oracle own free client tool, very powerful with lots of featured with click option. But I don’t like this because its heavy , hangs/freezes a lot in slow network connection and main this I dislike is, it tries to be oversmart tool, like suggesting code table which makes coding slow and impatient.
Good for Newbies, bad for moderate and expert |
| Toad | Right now my friends are using Toad 11. Great tool with lots and lots of feature. Most of the time you don’t need to write a code single click can do many thing which is good for newbies and bad also cause it will help you to forget the code. Disadvantage is it is not free and cost is high for normal use. And disk and memory consumption is really high and hangs whole toad system without any reason |
| SQL Tools | One of my favorite tool, very very light and doesn’t have many feature like Toad or SQL developer. But still some feature are very handy like object view and list with their reference and reference child. Testing code. i recommend this especially for the Pl/SQL developer . Disadvantages: though its free it has stopped developing further version since 2011 and sometimes it doesn’t support some datatype like BLOB, XMLDATA type |
| DB Visualizer | I like this tool just to view schema diagram, though SQL Developer plugin supports Schema diagram, but DB visualizer gives you extra feature to see schema diagram. |
Personally for me SQL Tool and SQL Developer is enough to do all DBA daily task and both of them is 100% free 🙂