Squirrel SQL (Colin Bell and others)

Free or Paid? Free Price: Free Databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MariaDB Operating Systems: Windows, Mac, Linux Latest Version: v4.1.0 Latest Version Date: 30 Apr 2020 Website

Squirrel took me a bit of time to get set up. The installation process was pretty easy. However, when I went to run Squirrel and set up a connection, I had some issues.

Squirrel uses a concept called aliases, which is another name for a connection. An alias uses a driver, which specifies how the application connects to a database. There are a lot of driver options, which makes Squirrel great as it can connect to all kinds of databases.

However, I had to manually configure the drivers to get this set up. Squirrel comes with two Oracle drivers (ODBC and Thin Client) and I had to manually add the path to a JAR file to the drivers tab in order for them to work.

Once I did this, I had to manually update the connection string to make sure it met the specific required format. After all this, I was able to connect.

It would have been good if the drivers were already configured, or if there was a way for the configuration to happen automatically. Also, the connection setup could have been easier – specify the server name, database name, username and password, just like other IDEs. There was a good chance that I could have gotten the connection string wrong.

Now, enough about the connections. After loading Squirrel and playing around with it, it looks like a powerful tool.

The UI has a very Java look and feel. It’s not something I personally like and feels very unintuitive, but that’s just my opinion from using it for a short period. The icons are not easy to immediately understand. Also, the SQL query window is only one line high, which seems unreasonably small for any kind of SQL development. It’s easily expanded though, so it’s a minor annoyance.

I also noticed that there are a lot of tabs on the screen. I don’t know if there’s a better way to lay it out but it seemed a bit cluttered. Also, the Session menu contained so many options that I had to scroll off the screen to see them. This could be improved by moving some options to other menus which hardly had any options.

When running a query, the results are displayed as a grid below the window. It not only shows the results, but shows all kinds of other features that other IDEs don’t have. It shows some metadata about the columns, such as their data types which is very handy. It lets you see a “rotated table” of the results, which is where the columns and rows are switched.

You can prepare reports or charts based on the data pretty easily, which is helpful. It also allows you to drill down into the data based on the data returned for each column, which I can see as being very helpful for analysing your results!

Several other standard IDE features are included and seem to work well, such as code autocomplete, SQL history, visual query builder, and bookmarks for SQL code.

There are a lot of settings in Squirrel that can be changed, which is good if you want to have more control over the software.

Overall it’s a useful IDE with some great features.

Pros

Great features available for the result set (metadata, drill down, reports)

Lots of settings to change

Cons