When I work in Oracle the thing I miss the most are the tools provided by SQL Server.

In SQL Server 2000, they had Query Analyzer and the Management Console. From those two applications, I could control everything about SQL Server.

In 2005, they rolled all of that into a single application called Sql Server Management Studio, and additionally rolled a lot of the functionality into Visual Studio 2005 as well.

I love using those tools. They're visual, powerful and if I need to get into the nitty-gritty SQL, I can.

Why, oh why, can't Oracle have something like that? I''m sick of working in Notepad++ building all these scripts - which I'm not sure are going to run, and then going to Oracle SQL *Plus to run them, only to discover I have some typo somewhere in that mass of SQL code.

Oracle is a powerful system - it has a lot of good features. Yet how you work in it is definitely not one of them.

IMO, Oracle needs to provide a good, powerful, visual interface to their system. I don't want to have to do everything in Oracle through SQL, and to be honest, the web interface that is provided is not good enough. Not when it's compared to SQL Server's Admin Console.