Whether you’re a database administrator or a jack of all trades sysadmin, Oracle databases can be tricky to manage and monitor. In this article, we’ll dive into seven of the best database tools you can use to manage your Oracle database.
Here are the top seven best Oracle database tools:
- SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (FREE TRIAL) First choice for medium to large-sized organizations that need to improve their coding efficiency, speed up projects, and automate their reporting or troubleshooting tasks.
- RazorSQL Built-in efficiency tools and customizable dashboards.
- dbForge Studio for Oracle Features Code Refactoring to speed up the development and testing process.
- Navicat Features cloud-based team collaboration between databases.
- Toad Built-in health database health checker with reporting.
- Dbwatch Suited for larger development teams with multi-tiered pricing.
- MyOra A completely free lightweight database monitor.
The best Oracle database tools
1. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (FREE TRIAL)
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is a high-level cross-platform tool to help database administrators and MSPs closely monitor the performance of their most important Oracle-based databases. At its core, you can pull up the real-time status of your database or quickly toggle to your historical metrics from the past.
The backend of the monitoring system collects data down to the nearest second and leverages anomaly detection to bring potentially problematic activity to your attention before it causes any downtime. Anomaly detection is designed to work even better over time as it learns the normal ranges and average response times of your different databases.
Wait-time analysis works in conjunction with anomaly detection to help you visualize specific elements of your Oracle database that may need your attention. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer focuses on query and table optimization to help improve and maintain ideal response time. This includes built-in tuning advisors to help guide you towards corrective action for the problems that it detects. The tuning advisor helps highlight indexing opportunities, inefficient query structures, and further optimizations based on how your users are querying for data.
Under the Performance tab, you can sort both and monitor the metrics for your database server, as well as the database itself. You can sort key data by the highest wait time, upward wait time trends, and physical resource utilization through an intuitive reporting feature. SolarWinds DPA puts you in a proactive state, so you can focus more on optimizations, and less on putting out fires.
If you need 100% uptime for your Oracle databases in your business, SolarWinds DPA has the tools and proactive monitoring features you need to keep things running smoothly. Licensing is available as both a monthly subscription as well as a perpetual license. You can grab a free 14-day trial of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to try out for yourself.
2. RazorSQL
While RazorSQL supports many different database types, it specifically does a great job with Oracle while still being flexible enough to support other environments. RazorSQL has a dedicated Oracle database browser and PL/SQL editor to provide extended functionality and decision making.
Circling back to the database browser, managing schemas and tables is intuitive through the table creation tool. Managing different aspects of your database through the tool helps move things along a lot quicker, and speeds up the code writing process significantly.
The user interface is customizable and makes it easy to work on multiple tables while maintaining an overview of your database. While there are other tools that incorporate reporting and graphing features into their dashboards, RazorSQL does a great job at keeping its features simple and easy to access.
RazorSQL is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS. Licensing for RazorSQL starts at $99.95 (£79.95) per user for a perpetual license. You can test-drive RazorSQL free for a full 30-day trial.
3. dbForge Studio for Oracle
dbForge Studio for Oracle from Devart is built to help Oracle developers increase their coding speed and efficiency through helpful data editing and troubleshooting tools. If you’re managing multiple Oracle servers you’ll have the ability to sync data between your systems as well as automate schema management during development.
Inside you’ll find helpful features such as IntelliSense code completion that significantly speeds up the process of writing out SQL queries or PL/SQL based code. The automatic code completion feature analyzes the block of code and suggests objects depending on its placement and context within the database.
In dbForge Studio you don’t have to search the database every time to pull the most current information on existing objects. The quick information feature allows you to access the most current properties on an object during the development process within the same coding window.
Lastly, dbForge Studio utilizes code refactoring to rename tables, views, functions, and packages in just a few clicks. Code refactoring automatically seeks out and updates all references to the newly renamed object. Keeping track of these changes can all be viewed under the Rename window.
If you’re primarily running one or more Oracle databases, dbForge Studio is a flexible tool that will help you increase your coding speed and shave time off of routine database administration. Pricing for a single one year starts at $199.95 (£162.79). You can download the express edition for free.
4. Navicat
Navicat for Oracle features key tools to help optimize your Oracle development and quickly share, create, and organize information securely between teams. Navicat comes with the features you’d expect from an IDE software such as code completion, data synchronization, and an intuitive object designer.
One of my favorite features in Navicat is the ability to turn your database data into a clean graph format without much work or planning. This is a nice break if you’ve been stuck in a CLI all day and need a fresh look at the data you’ve been working in all day. There is also a dark mode feature, which is a welcome change to the bright white background so many other platforms use. If you manage any cloud databases such as Amazon RDS or Oracle Cloud, Navicat can also integrate and support those environments as well as on local Oracle servers.
Navicat helps you leverage automation to take some of the workload off of running reports or performing routine database maintenance. Under the Automation tab, you can easily schedule tasks to run queries and reports, transfer or sync data, or import new data from other databases. You can also choose to receive email notifications to be alerted when your scheduled task has completed, or if it failed.
Navicat Cloud allows for distributed database access and collaboration with little configuration needed ahead of time. All of your connections settings, queries, and virtual groups will be synchronized across the cloud. Where most Oracle database tools fail to get collaboration right, Navicat makes the process of collaboration between teams easy. Navicat uses Amazon S3 for storage and encrypts files using 256-bit AES encryption. All files are protected by SSL while in transit.
Navicat is available for purchase as both a monthly service and a perpetual license for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Monthly pricing starts at $34.00 (£27.68) per user, per month.
5. Toad for Oracle
Despite the quirky name, Toad by Quest is a powerful database management tool built specifically to improve Oracle database performance in the cloud or on-premises. Features like Sensitive Data Protection help you define and protect specific data across Oracle quickly, and dynamically update all of those records with ease. Built-in performance testing makes Toad a great resource to promote the DevOps process and allows you to run simulated workload replay testing, stress tests, and more before the database is deployed.
Toad comes with an extensive set of database performance diagnostic tests that can be run to fix database errors, as well as highlight areas for improvement and optimization. Similar to Navicat, Toad has DevOps-ready team coding that provides collaboration and auditing across schema objects.
Lastly, Toad has an excellent database health checker that lets you run a number of tests and reports to gather specific information about an entire database within a set scope. For example, you can quickly run a report to list all-powerful roles that have been granted to users, and what objects those permissions can influence. There are dozens of preconfigured health checks you can run to test your schema, performance, configuration, and overall vulnerability.
Toad is available as a free 30-day trial. Pricing for the base model of Toad for Oracle starts at $1054.00 (£857.51) per seat.
6. dbWatch
DbWatch focuses on Oracle performance monitoring and automated testing to help keep your databases optimized and fully functioning. The features in dbWatch make this tool more tailored to larger enterprises or development teams and can support over 1000 instances. Features like server consolidation help DBAs cut down on unnecessary resource consumption and eliminate the complexity of larger database environments.
Through a customizable dashboard, you can monitor the real-time and historical performance and health of your database. You’ll receive a breakdown of servers, hardware, and resource utilization that helps you shift to a more proactive state of database administration.
DbWatch comes in three versions. Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise. Essentials only offer database monitoring, while the Professional version includes many of the other IDE features like alerting, reporting, and automation. Like most Oracle database tools dbWatch is cross-platform and viable in the cloud, virtual, or physical environments.
Pricing starts at $2699 (£2195.85) for five instances for a full year. You can try a full 30-day free trial of dbWatch to see if it’s right for your database management needs.
7. MyOra
MyOra is a completely free Oracle database monitoring tool that’s lightweight and ideal for smaller companies or DBA teams on a budget. While MyOra lacks some of the more complex enterprise features like predictive analysis and anomaly detection, it excels in being a simple and free alternative for less demanding database monitoring.
No internet connection is required for MyOra to start working, simply run the installer and point it to your Oracle database. MyOra will instantly start pulling real-time data into the dashboard’s six interactive displays. You can view metrics such as Wait Analysis, System Waits, DB Activity, and overall top five processes.
You can drill down and further customize the dashboard to display over a dozen different metrics across your database like Latch Misses, Call Rate, or Physical I/O. Both the Performance Monitor and DB Activity section gives you a simple graphical look at your database usage through pie charts, bar charts, and graphs. MyOra does lack the ability to save and export historical data, so if long term data collection is a priority MyOra might not be for you.
MyOra is one of the most portable tools on the list, and can easily be thrown on a flash drive, and run through a simple executable. If all you need is simple real-time monitoring, it’s tough to beat MyOra. You can download MyOra for free on their official website.
Conclusion
No matter what database you’re working with, having a performance monitoring and automation tool to assist you could save you countless hours and potential outages. So which of the seven Oracle database tools are right for you?
If you’re a medium to a large-sized development team, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is going to be your best tool to monitor critical databases, and improve the efficiency of your workflow in Oracle. Features like anomaly detection will put your department in a proactive position, and give you the peace of mind to focus on optimizations rather than putting out fires.
Smaller organizations that don’t need some of the enterprise features or automation might benefit from dbWatch’s feature-based packages. Lastly, if you’re on a budget and just need real-time monitoring, MyOra is a great lightweight tool that can do just that.
Do you use any Oracle database tools in your development process? Let us know what your favorite tool is in the comments below.
