Setting up Eclipse SQLExplorer to access Oracle

I can’t believe SQL*Plus has survived for 5 minutes, let alone decades. And for some other equally unanswerable reason, free replacements are hard to come by. Toad is the most popular, but it’s this so-called “freeware” that expires every month.

Anyway, I think I’ve found an open-source tool with a past, and hopefully a future. Eclipse has a plugin called SQLExplorer that uses JDBC to connect to Oracle databases.

UPDATE: This seems to be still alive, I updated it today to version 3.5.0RC2. I had to download the plugin from sourceforge, extract to the Eclipse 3.3 directory, then re-set up the Oracle drivers, as detailed below…

Here’s a screenshot:

There are minimal docs for this stuff, so here’s a two-minute setup HOWTO.

Download and install Eclipse.
Run Eclipse, select Help->Software Updates->Find and Install, and install the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF).
Download SQLExplorer and unzip to the eclipse directory (using the paths in the zip file, it should unzip into the eclipse/plugins directory).
Restart Eclipse and click the “Open Perspective” button (top right). Select Other->SQLExplorer. You’re now looking at the SQLExplorer interface!
To connect to an Oracle database, right-click on Oracle Thin Driver in the Drivers list and select “Change the selected driver” (copy doesn’t seem to work at this time :< ).
Update the example URL to use a valid JDBC path. Mine was “jdbc:oracle:thin:@trek:1521:trek92”.
You now have to add the Oracle driver to the class path. Select the “Extra Class Path” tab, hit Add, and browse under your Oracle client directory for this file: [oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14.jar]
Then press “List Drivers”, it should fill in the Driver Class Name field. Hit OK, and with any luck your Oracle Thin Driver should now have an enabled check next to it.
You can repeat this for the Oracle OCI driver, using a different Example URL.
Click on the Aliases tab, right-click, and select “Create New Alias”. Fill in the fields, they should be self-evident.
Right-click the new alias, and select “Open”. SQLExplorer should now read in the metadata for the whole database, and you should be good to go. Have fun!