2013 has been a big year for us here at Oracle and in the tools group. We saw major updates for both SQL Developer and SQL Developer Data Modeler. For the data modeler, versions 3.3 and 4.0 brought significant feature and platform updates. Both are still free by the way 🙂
I’m still very, very high and excited about the new and improved search feature introduced in v3.3. I’ve blogged quite a bit on it, just in case you missed it.
That Million Dollar Question
I get this question a LOT, by the way, ‘When are you going to start charging for SQL Developer?’ I take this as very high praise as many of you assume the quality is such that’s it’s worthy of your hard-earned currency.
The short answer is ‘Never.’ Of course, that’s such a fun word to throw around and get in trouble. But, we provide the tools you need to build your applications for the Database and Application platforms you’ve already invested so many dollars into. We’re not into scooping up the pennies for our tools. You see the same approach from several other database vendors.
The De Facto Standard
We’ve also seen increased adoption of the tools. We consistently rank super high in the overall downloads from OTN and are seeing continued double-digit year-over-year growth in the number of users. That number today is just south of 3,500,000.
I’ve personally spent a lot of time giving free webinars to customers looking to standardize on SQL Developer as their go-to tool for developers, DBAs, and query folks. From the 10 user ‘mom and pop shops’ all the way up to the Fortune 100 companies with thousands of users. The entire team also loved seeing person after person visiting us at the Open World booth in September to tell us how much they’re enjoying the newer releases.
But of course, we have more work to do.
Can you believe there are folks out there that still have not heard of SQL Developer? This is what inspires and challenges me every morning. I don’t enjoy hunting as an outdoorsman, but I do love hunting for new users in this domain.
My Favorite New Feature
I often ask folks what their favorite feature is. They usually hem and haw and tell me something around runnign queries or exporting data to Excel. That’s probably why more than 15,000 of you enjoyed reading about the /*csv*/ trick this year.
But that’s not exactly ‘new.’ If I had to pick ONE new favorite feature we introduced in version 4.0, it’s probably the Alt+G ‘Search’ bit we built into the editors. It automatically searches the database for objects whose name matches the selected text.
I’ll probably post something next week like one of those ‘Top Posts from 2013’ things lazy-bloggers like to put up during the holidays. In the meantime, feel free to share your favorite new feature or happening from 2013!
