As the title says, this is a rant.

Here’s the background. I’d been assigned an (old) IBM laptop running Windows XP at work. Except I like to use my own (newer) laptop to write code. So the only reason I even boot up the laptop is to use Visio, or maybe SQL Developer.

Usually I just krdc into the database server, and run SQL Plus off it. Oh, except today, I wanted to get the length of the column names, which is not available (why?!?) in SQL Plus. Or maybe there is something else other than “desc tableName” that I don’t know about, but I digress.

I booted up the aforementioned, crusty old laptop — What specs? see below — and waited. And waited.

cpu-z

My goodness. I heard from a fellow developer that they’re gonna phase out SQL Plus (why?!?) in the next version of Oracle, but, judging by the (not sweet) performance of SQL Developer, this is not a good idea.

Of course, it’s an old laptop (2004), and I’m obviously comparing apples to oragnes, but seriously I’d take SQL Plus anytime.