Raptor is out of the cage

Oracle have released Raptor (a freely available GUI SQL query tool) which may be of interest to those of you who use Toad or are frustrated with the terseness of the SQL*Plus interface.

Raptor is primarily a cross platform, PL/SQL developer tool, written in Java (60 MB download). The SQL output is a scrollable grid (like Toad) and there is the standard schema browser, PL/SQL debugger, SQL pretty printer, DDL generator and a graphical interface to explain plan for query tuning.

All in all, a very promising release which fills a surprising (to me) gap in Oracle’s range of database products.