30 SQL Developer Tips in 30 Days, Day 9: You Only Need to Run One Copy at a Time

You know that thing where you’re sitting shotgun, or the horror – in the backseat – and you notice the driver doing something that drives you crazy? For me it was my best friend in college who refused to acknowledge that his car had 4 gears. He’d never shift out of 3rd gear. Somehow I’m still sane, mostly.

Well, there’s something I notice folks doing in SQL Developer that drives me just as crazy. They will run like 2 or 3 copies at a time. You do not NEED to do this.

Here’s why they do it, methinks:

1. they have a busy connection and need to run a 2nd or 3rd query
2. they are afraid of doing something BAD in production

We have features built into the tool to help you with both of these scenarios.

Unshared Worksheets

If your connection is busy, and you want to run another query, just hit Ctrl+Shift+N in a worksheet, and we’ll open another worksheet with a new connection that you can run your query with.

Color Coded Connections

A new feature for version 4.0, when you define a connection, you can now assign a color scheme. Each and every editor that is attached to this connection will have its border highlighted in this color.

Rant Over

You can of course run as many copies of the tool as you want. But, hopefully now you know if you really NEED to, at least for these two scenarios.