Trends in software migration.

We had some decent tools at work. Tools like TOAD to write queries and do some analysis on Oracle databases. We had the tool until the company jacked up the prices of the licenses. XMLSpy did a similar thing and now we do without. I suppose it's like crack, give you a few cheap hits, get addicted and jack up the price.

It's hard to work without a tool to write queries and sqlplus (Oracle's command line tool) just doesn't cut it. There's a product called SQL Developer from Oracle that is free and supposed appeared to do some of what TOAD was doing and many of us moved to it. After using it for a while, I can honestly say that it's a pig. It uses 250 meg to load up. If you leave your machine on for a while, you'll find it using a half gig of memory. 500,000,000 bytes to run sql commands. I only have 2 gigs on my work box, so after the operating system, Outlook, bug tracking, virus scanning, web browser, and other assorted tools, I don't exactly have half a gig to query a database.

This appears to be a consistent pattern with Java applications. Use up all the available memory and make them buy more. I thought .NET apps were piggish when a simple service required 20 megabytes, but when you're using more memory that a piggish operating system, it's time to rethink how you're writing your application.

I long for the days when you could code and get the whole application under 100k. I think I'm going back to write some C code just to watch the binaries go under 100k.