Recommend me a good online SQL editor

September 13, 2016 10:43 PM

I've had a look online and found a number of useful online SQL text editors that will apply nice standard formatting and some highlighting which is great but it's made me realise that what i really want is something that will colour code my table and field references to make readability a bit easier. Does such a thing exist and can you point me at it?

I'm using Oracle BI to write SQL queries. As the query window is ridiculously small, non-expandable and has no formatting options, I've end up doing most of it in wordpad then pasting it back into oracle BI.

(Online is greatly preferred as my I suspect my IT dept won't look favourably on a request install something i found on the internet.)

posted by jcm to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

But your IT dept is happy with you entering company SQL onto some 3rd party server? Buy dbvisualizer, costs little and supports a ridiculous number of SQL variants, requires Java which might be a problem.
posted by epo at 2:53 AM on September 14, 2016

You might try Oracle's SQLDeveloper if your IT department will allow you to install it
posted by thelonius at 3:00 AM on September 14, 2016

I suspect your IT department would be fine with you installing Microsoft's free SQL Server Management Studio (you can just install SSMS on its own - download the 'with tools' version and untick everything else when you run the installation). It has very nice syntax highlighting, a lovely big window, and also allows you to organise your scripts sensibly in folders and projects. It's very pleasant to write code in.
You can even connect to your Oracle database directly.
posted by Acheman at 3:01 AM on September 14, 2016

I have not used it for years, but TOAD for Oracle was one of the best at times in the past. It was pretty expensive, though.

One problem you might run into is differing formatting standards. I use Management Studio and I don't like how it formats code.

Searching on Online SQL Editor does bring up some possibilities, but I don't know anything about them.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:22 AM on September 14, 2016

There's a flash drive version of Notepad++ that you could use -- if you download that version, it's a stand-alone exe that doesn't need to be installed. Notepad++ is pretty awesome because it will do syntax highlighting for a lot of different languages. The 'full' version I think has more features and is a very small installation, if you think you can get away with installing it. It's a souped up version of Notepad.

I really don't understand why you'd be writing SQL without access to SSMS though. It is not worth the pain.
posted by possibilityleft at 4:38 AM on September 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

A proper text editor will be a vast improvement over Wordpad.

If your IT department is reasonable (doubly so if your company employs software developers, who may well already be using it), they should be happy with Atom, which is a) free and b) has SQL syntax highlighting out of the box. I've never seen something that colors different table names differently, but I won't swear such a thing doesn't exist.
posted by hoyland at 4:38 AM on September 14, 2016

You could try SQuirrel SQL Client. It is similar to TOAD but it's free.
posted by gt2 at 4:48 AM on September 14, 2016