Software development never really stops. The development cycle is truly a circle. Once a release is ready, the developers don’t go on break awaiting orders. There’s always the next sprocket to build or widget to refactor.
And so comes one of the best parts of my job: helping figure out what those widgets and sprockets will be. And while we don’t comment on new features or release dates of our products, I will give you an update on things in general you can expect in the near future.
Areas of Emphasis
Software releases are often designed around one or more themes. 8i was ‘the Internet’ and 11g was ‘the Grid.’ SQL Developer 4.0 will be ‘the Matrix.’ Just kidding. No, we have several things coming together in this release, including but not limited to:
- Look & Feel – UI polishing
- The ‘guts’ – framework, Java, Subversion updates
- Performance and Ease of Use – true for EVERY release
- Working with Data – grids, Excel, the Cart
- Command Line stuff
- Reporting
Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
Mostly from users. We talk to lots and lots of people on multiple channels. Whenever I help a customer they are also helping me make the product better by sharing their personal experiences with our tools. We also have our Exchange where people can submit their ideas and have the community vote them up (or not.)
Stay tuned for more news as we get closer to our release date. You can stay on top of things by liking our page on Facebook too.
10 Comments
Hi,
I’ve used this tool for quite a long time and I’ve noticed that it consumes a lot of memory, even at fresh start and without doing so much work. This problem persists in my current version (3.1.07).
I also noticed that after running a query that reads a lot of information the memory increases as supposed but then it is not freed after closing the working window or even after closing the connection to the database.
Jose
You’re probably seeing the OS tell you much more memory is being used than what’s actually happening. Once memory is reserved for the JVM, it’s never given back to the OS, even if SQL Developer isn’t using it. You can observe this for yourself using the jstack.exe in your JDK/bin directory.
That being said, if you were to upgrade to version 3.2.20.09 of SQL Developer and a Java 7 JDK, you’ll see better memory management for Windows.
I think I already posted this on the exchange, but a great feature would be to see package or package spec’s tree of procedures/functions/global variables/error handling blocks etc. Somethign like this is in the allround automations product – PL/SQL Developer and I think that is the only thing that keeps me on on that product, rather then switching to Oracle SQL Dev. I know your product is called Oracle SQL Developer, but maybe it can be friendly for those who organize PL/SQL code into packages quite a lot 🙂
That sounds like the Quick Outline panel – right-mouse in your procedure editor to launch it. Right now it just shows and lets you navigate the package members, not the variables and exceptions. To enhance that to give you what you’re asking for seems reasonable to me.
Such an option exists on the database stored packages as all the data dictionary exists within the database I guess. But for example if I open a local package (one on my HDD) it wont have that possibility to parse the package contents and provide a quick outline.
Well there are also some quirks like variable highlighting that can be done, but not as crucial as package outlines.
I did try making a custom plugin using the JDeveloper SDK, but didnt succeed as it didnt turn out to be that easy for me to use the SDK to make an extension for Oracle SQL Dev 🙁
Please oh please add “Full Screen” mode support for Mac OS X. That is all, thank you.
If you use the Java 7 JDK I think you get this. The developer just showed me it working on his Mac.
Hmm how odd, I don’t have the option.
My mac is running the latest of all software involved. Java 1.7.0_17 and SQL Developer 3.2.20.09 and Mac OSX 10.8.3.
For clarification, I was referring to the “Enter Full Screen” feature which is common in modern OS X applications which expands the application to the full extents of the window by hiding the menu bar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom.
The “Full Screen” feature in SQL Developer where you can double-click a tab to expand the workspace works perfectly fine (and it is very useful!).
Cheers!
Then the answer is likely ‘will be in our next version’ because he was showing me a dev build. Fingers crossed 🙂
Ahh, most excellent! Cheers.