Developer tools to directly access databases [closed]

Question

I work with several different databases and find myself trying connecting to these quite often to test a query. I use the database specific tools to connect to the DB and run the query.

I find these DB specific tools like SQL Query Analyzer (SQL-Server), Oracle Enterprise Manager, MySQL Query Browser to be quite clunky and slow when it comes to running quick queries and looking at data directly. It is also hard to remember all the userids and pwds for the develop and test databases.

What tools do you use as developers to connect to the database of choice? I use Eclipse as an IDE. So any Eclipse specific tips are also appreciated.

Even if a tool were to work with one DB and not with the other, I am willing to look into it if it were more user-friendly than the one the DB vendor provides. I am already using 3 different ones.

Answer 1

SQuirreL, written in java, will work with any RDBMS for which there's a JDBC driver.

It works very well for both sending SQL, rendering result sets, and allowing browsing of database objects (from a tree). For several RDBMS, it includes extensions to automatically generate common statements.

Especially nice is that the query pane executes either the selected sql, or the line the cursor is on up to the first blank line. This allows you to write several statements, and to execute them either individually or in a batch.

And it's free and open source.