Because I work in higher education, and budget dollars are always limited, the fact that this product is delivered at no cost to us as Oracle users is phenomenal. Only a small fraction of our in-house staff are using another solution to write code that affects our student information system (SIS). IT staff supporting the SIS could not do our jobs without SQL Developer.

We use it for JD Edwards to SQL the queries on the SQL database side, so it gives us the results fast. In this way, we are able to help the business.

The process is that once we run it to get the results, we can optimize it and send them out to the business users.

It makes life easier because I don't need to install something onsite when I am with a customer. And, since it's free, it helps me to unify and streamline my approach over multiple projects so I don't have to have a different approach for different customers.

The new version 18 is really helpful, with a more flexible GUI and more reliable connectors.

SQL Developer has allowed me to produce excellent system documentation, rapidly optimise query performance and allowed me to create top-quality source and object deployment methodologies.

One of the goals of the tool is to allow the user to complete tasks with the least number of steps. For example, to load an Excel spreadsheet into a table, you just have to complete a simple, four-step wizard and all the data will be in your table.

Another example is having quick access to queries you executed some time ago without having to manually save them. That way, you can still access an important or frequently used query that maybe you forgot to save.

Generating data files from queries with minimum setup is a time saver. You can preset the output format you want (CSV, insert, Excel, JSON to name a few), run your query and the file will be generated in that format.

When I was reviewing some things in SQL Developer, one of the things that jumped out at me, especially in a former job a couple years ago, was the Cart feature. It allowed you to really streamline processes. Our process before was my developers would create some type of PL/SQL script, it could include DDL, a creating table, grants/permissions, obviously the scripting behind that, and we would take those series of files, we would put them on a shared drive on our network where our DBAs could then go get those files, and then promote them into our production environment.

The Cart feature, which came out I think around version 4 or so of SQL Developer, allowed you in the tool itself to select all of those components that developers had been working on, patch them up into a file that included everything our DBAs would need in order to roll that onto production. We can then just send them basically this shopping cart. They could take SQL Developer on the back end, open that cart up and basically deploy that through whatever environment.

That really allowed us to make sure that all the files and all of the components of any particular project we were working on were together, because we're not trying to copy this SQL file and put it over here, and this database definition, this table definition file in SQL over here, and grab a bunch of different things and stick them in a shared drive. We were able to use the tool itself, SQL Developer, to do that packaging for us and then with all the surrounding code needed to actually deploy that, and just pass that off to our DBAs who can then just execute that series of commands. They didn't have to come back and ask us anything. We eliminated kind of the question-answer piece between what the developer wanted and what the DBA was trying to do, because we were able now to encapsulate all of that into this Cart file. The Cart file included all of the coding that we needed our DBAs to execute on, to deploy into our development production environment space, to put our changes in. It really streamlined a process that we had integrated.

At a prior organization, we had no reporting capabilities. Business Users would ask me to run reports for them. Since there were restrictions in other delivery mechanisms (think: web front end), I ended up creating SQL Developer Reports and then distributing those to the Business Users. This isn’t an ideal way to distribute reports, but it worked, and freed up my time to do other more important things.

Where clients of mine have adopted using the data modeler in particular, the teams are able to become more efficient because they have the data model to use as a reference diagram and documentation to the structure of the database. That made planning changes to the database, reports and things like that much easier to do, and less error prone. Whereas before, when they didn't have a model and they were having to guess at what the data structures were and do a lot of individual investigations. It took a lot longer to get things done.

It also allowed us to produce a data dictionary for the organization, which helped business users. I deal primarily in data warehousing and so from a business intelligence perspective, being able to publish a data dictionary to the business users was very helpful because it helped them understand the database that they're trying to pull the data from.

• It is very easy to use. 
• I have a lot of flexibility with it. 
• For DBA tasks, it is also very good.

We can switch between heterogeneous databases.

After installing a MySQL driver, for example, we can work with these row stores. It also supports Oracle Cloud legacy schema-as-a-service connections and the newer DBaaS connections.

The biggest thing is really the cost savings as opposed to using a competitor project or competitor application to SQL Developer. The competitors cost significantly more.

Since Oracle SQL Developer is free, we no longer incurred the cost of the previous tool. There was also benefit to our organization in that the SQL Developer community is very active and growing, so there is a lot of resources available to us.

It's a free tool which allows you to see an Oracle Database structure and run queries against Oracle Databases.

As a database trainer, I would like to say that although SQL developer is an open-source software, yet it provides a lot of features that you can find only in paid versions of its counterparts. It is lightweight; hence, it takes up less memory space, which makes it more efficient and faster. Furthermore, it has an easy installation process that leads to the company spending less time and money on lengthy trainings for its employees; just a refresher course is enough! This single software can connect with other databases provided by different vendors such as Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, etc.

It's quick and rapid.

You get to the point and you can choose what you want to do. It gives you a complete picture of the database.

If you make it the tool you use, everyone can talk the same "language" in terms of the tool and the use cases. Once you know it, how to use it, you can tell the whole organization how a given task will be done.

The solution I've created is revenue forecasting and our organization goes to Wall Street with the earnings call, with the forecast. So it's very valuable to the finance department.

Faster access to DB tables.

We have a QA team and we don't want to buy a special product for them just to query the database, so we use Oracle SQL Developer.

Using execution plan, I am able to do lots of query tuning.

Helps us to test and to develop scripts for monitoring applications.

It has reduced the time it takes to manage data. We use the product for data analysis, building SQL statements to construct reports, and analysis and optimization of SQL statements.

Standardized tool.

We can install it on each machine, every user can install it by himself. And we have a lot of support for the utility from Oracle, for free.

We can understand where everything is and we can we work with it very easily.

The main benefit of SQL Developer is that it is free.