![[Partial screenshot of SDD user interface]](sdd.png)
The problem with Oracle is that the tools required to do very basic DBA operations are usually very hard to use and/or extreamely expensive. For example; to be able to make a "live" copy of your database by duplicating it, you either need to spend an awful lot of time getting used to the commandline tools Oracle ships with, or be willing to pay high price for a tool that does it "nearly all by itself". Of course, there's always the possibility that you've worked with Oracle databases since version 3 (or something; you know - at the time it was written in fortran†) and are quite satisfied with how you can do just about anything you want by the means of a simple SQL script.
†No, this is not meant to be a disrespectful comment towards ancient fortran/Oracle gurus (or modern gurus for that matter, to each their own) quite the opposite in fact; wish I'd be able to do things as easily.
One day (December 21st in 2005 to be exact) I got so frustrated that I did a quick hack that allowed me to duplicate data between identical schemas easily. Of course, it has it's problems (it's limited to a single schema (unless you have DBA-privileges of course) and it doesn't really understand locator objects like BLOB, CLOB too well or datatypes whose "best before"-date has been passed a long time ago (you know; datatypes like LONG and LONG RAW) at all - however, the latest version has a sort of support for some of those datatypes. The support ain't perfect, but it works sometimes). Anyway, this little gadget is better than many of the things I've found on the Internet so far - and it's definitely cheaper than 99% of them ... after all, you can't get much cheaper than "free", can you? We just need to remember that it's a result of just a few hours of coding - so hopefully not too much is expected from it. :)
The application is offered as freeware (I would've wanted to share it open source too, but unfortunately there are a few (commercial) libraries I use that have such license destrictions that open sourcing is out of the question). So; without further ado, just download the package, unzip it and ... start using it. There's no user's manual, but I think it's rather self-explanatory. Just remember that you need to have Oracle Client installed and NET8-settings properly configured (TNSNAMES is on the top of the list) in order to use this tool.
If You are having trouble with your tables, views, indexes or code in general, the best you can do is look at Impact Systems' TOYS. I personally use it to keep code in sync between databases. For data however, I really use this quick hack of mine - daily.