GTK Oracle 1.41 review

GTK Oracle is a GTK+ 2 interface to Oracle that aids in Oracle application development and testing. Its features include a schema

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Colby Farrell

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GTK Oracle is a GTK+ 2 interface to Oracle that aids in Oracle application development and testing.

Its features include a schema browser, multiple SQL work areas, SQL syntax highlighting, bind variable entry widgets in the command window, and SQL*Plus-style command scripting.

For SQL statement analysis and tuning there is a tree-style SQL statement "explain plan" facility and the ability to load SQL statements from the runtime cursor cache (V$SQL table), Oracle Statspack repository, and the Oracle Automatic Workload Repository in Oracle version 10g. Full statistics are available on loaded statements.

Here are some key features of "GTK Oracle":
manually running your application's SQL, outside of the application itself
trying to find out what queries your application is even running
checking and gathering statistics
comparing plans
running statspack to evaluate results
autotracing
peeking in AWR
peeking the shared pool / v$sqlarea / statspack SQL
identifying high-resource SQL then this might be of some help.

Usage:

SQL in the text buffer (anything that gets run via the Execute button) is run on it's own thread in the background so it will not block the GUI part, and you can cancel it. This execution thread is started when you start up the program, hopefully never exits, and receives commands via a GLib asynchronous queue, so you can safely keep hitting Execute while a command is running, it will just execute them in order.

If you log in as SYSDBA you will get a combo box just under the main menubar. Changing the value will execute ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA='somebody'; so when you browse it will be as if you were this user. Be aware that any SQL you execute will result in SYS being recorded as the parsing user in the cursor cache, however.

If you want to access the cursor cache or statspack or AWR you will need to log in with SYSDBA privileges. You might be able to get away with simply having SELECT on SYS.V$SQLAREA and SYS.V$SQLTEXT.

SYS is excluded from the cursor cache browsing results. Otherwise you end up with a mass of recursive SQL, which you are not going to be able to tune and that is the point here. If you're a masochist and you do want to browse recursives I suppose you can just modify the relevant SQL so that SYS is not exculded and recompile. Have fun.

AWR features are only available on 10G servers.

DBMS_OUTPUT works, go to Edit->DBMS OUTPUT Enable

Requirements:
Oracle

What's New in This Release:
The PL/SQL compilation error popup has been replaced; errors now go to the results list, and double-clicking on an error line will highlight and scroll to the error in the SQL text.
Error location highlighting for all types in the Schema->Source tab has been added.
Oracle view browsing has been merged into the Source->Tables tab; views are shown italicized.
Table DDL extract now includes the table's associated indexes, constraints, ref. constraints, and grants.
Syntax highlighting for comments and Oracle hints has been added, and Ctrl-L will execute the command window line.