Waxing Cerebral

For a long time I have been looking for an open source database management tool that would be able to access any JDBC compliant database. I've used the great Oracle product, SQLDeveloper, for a long time and found it great for SQL Server management (usually performing quicker than using Microsoft's own Management Studio!). But now I've started using Derby (aka JavaDB aka Cloudscape) and SQLDeveloper is limited to Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Step in SQuirreL SQL. It has a pretty smooth interface, with great features like SQL syntax highlighting and even code completion. Released under the LGPL license, it is open source and contributions are welcomed, particularly for plugins. The plugins are important as JDBC is obviously a restricted subset of a database's functionality - a number of the existing plugins enable extra features for specific database types (eg. Derby's triggers).

Another very notable plugin is called graph which enables production of simple entity relationship diagrams (ERD) from a database connection. While it doesn't display multiplicity indicators, and some of the image exporting is a bit clunky, it is great to have this functionality in an open source product. (I now use NetBeans' UML Modeling which is great for the common UML diagrams, but lacking ERDs).