Anders Andreasen Blog

In my previous post I described how to use OpenOffice Base as a MS SQL server GUI front-end. On some occasions I have experienced OObase to hang when executing queries or otherwise communicating with the SQL server. For a more professional experience the Oracle SQL developer can be used instead. Oracle SQL developer can be downloaded free-of-charge from the Oracle website.

Download and install Oracle SQL developer

1. Goto Oracle website
2. Accept the license agreement
3. Unless you have an rpm based distribution choose the Oracle SQL Developer for other platforms(this will be assumed throughout this how-to)
4. Unzip the downloaded zip archive to e.g. /opt or /usr/local. Assuming pwd is the directory to which Oracle SQL developer was downloaded to
   sudo unzip sqldeveloper-2.1.1.64.45-no-jre.zip -d /opt
5. sqldeveloper can be started by the command
   sh /opt/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper.sh For convenience an alias can be added to .bashrc e.g.
   alias sqldeveloper='sh /opt/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper.sh'

Install jTDS JDBC driver

As with OOBase the jTDS JDBC driver is required for connecting to MS SQL server. Here’s how-to make it work.

1. If not already downloaded, download the latest JDBC driver from sourceforge
2. Unpack the archive and copy the jtds-1.2.5.jar into your java environment. On ubuntu 9.10 with Sun Java this is somewhere like /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/ext/ This should enable Oracle SQL developer to locate the driver
3. Start sqldeveloper. You should see the following screen
   
4. Click the big green plus in the connections pane and the following window will pop-up
   
5. If, for some reason, the (MS) SQLserver pane/entry is not there (only the Oracle) them the jTDS JDBC driver was not successfully loaded (perhaps copied to the wrong destination). The JDBC driver can be installed manually by choosing Preferences in the Tools menu
   Click “Add enty” and located the jtds-1.2.5.jar file on your system
6. Enter the address of the MS SQL server and your log-in credentials and you’re ready to go. Read more in the documentation on the Oracle website