Screaming Penguin

While SQLplus is a very capable and solid tool that comes with the Oracle client software, it is not the most efficient way to work with database content (not for me anyway.) There a few notable alternatives that I have done some minor research on so I thought I would expound on them here, in our forum. As is generally the case here, all of these products fit my required criteria or open source or at least a FREE version. There are tools that are GUI windows for SQLplus (not really sure why, but there are), tools that are minimal view, browse, update, delete and tools that are more comprehensive and allow all of the above plus database maintenance. THE LIST:

• TOAD - Tool for Oracle App Dev. VERY GOOD, COMPREHENSIVE - WINDOWS ONLY :(
• phporacleadmin - also good, in the vien of phpMyAdmin, uh, requires PHP and a webserver, which is great, had some trouble getting it to run right, looks like a GREAT idea that is still not quite stable. The advantage to this is that it is WEB based so no crap need be installed on each workstation, this is the way to go once the product matures.
• oracletool - Also good, more comprehensive, requires a webserver and PERL (arghh). Looks good, but I did not partake of the perl install. Again, this is web based, so this is better than a bunch of managed local clients running their own stuff.
• TORa - This is a KDE Oracle GUI based on the windows TOAD. Looks quite good, but would not install correctly on my machine. There are RPMs, but I had dependency issues. This is probably worth taking the time to setup right, but right now I dont have that time.
• ksqlplus This is a KDE SQLPLus replacement. Looks good, but not much more than the normal SQLPlus.
• kora KDE ORacle Admin tool that also looks good, but again my installation had troubles.