Attendees of the recent New England Oracle Applications User Group conference got a refresher course on some of the key tools that Oracle developers use to customize E-Business Suite applications. Sridhar Bogelli, the leader of the session and founder and chief executive officer of Apps Associates, an application development consultancy, told attendees that properly using the tools provided by Oracle and third-party vendors can help developers and their companies avoid embarrassing, production-related problems.
Seeing “Eight Key Tools for Oracle Application Developers” as the title gave away a tool that would likely be on the list. Before TOAD supported other platforms, it was T.O.A.D., an acronym expanded to the words in the article title. It is arguably similar to SQL Navigator in usablility. Each has their own quirks, although I would give some credit to Quest for putting good usability features into TOAD. It doesn’t quite have the usability of say the Opera web browser, but you can tell that there are developer-minded usability features in there. DB Artisan on the other hand is a rather generic program that does a good job for DBA’s with Oracle, but has awkward usability for those developing SQL. I think it’s good to see TOAD there, though it’s not unexpected.