title: Oracle DB (PL/SQL) Refactoring Tools
body: <p>I was wondering if there are any good refactoring tools for Oracle databases and especially for PL/SQL. I'm working on a project where half the developers are working with c# and the other half on the db where there is a large and complex schema and a large code base in pl/sql. We also use sql server but the database team work exclusively with Oracle.</p>
  
  <p>This code base is being worked on actively and is being refactored gradually but I was quite surprised to see how bad the refactoring tools for oracle seem to be (or at least in comparison to Eclipse and Resharper). </p>
  
  <p>The developers are using Toad which only has basic refactoring support (probably as its seems to be targeted more towards db admin then development). I've used Toad myself before but always had assumed for pl/sql there were more features for working with code but had never looked into it. Now as far as I can see the only refactorings that it provides are extract method (procedure) and variable renaming. I read an article comparing sql developer and pl/sql developer and these do not appear to have any better support for refactoring. I had a quick look at the eclipse data tools project but couldn't see that they've added refactoring support since I last used it (a few years ago).</p>
  
  <p>For Sql Server there exists Sql Refactor which when table structures are changed gets propagated through to the stored procedures. This for me is much cleaner and less error prone than having someone manually update all stored procedures. I used an older version of these tools on a project in the past and they seemed to be quite ok but a bit slow but that was a few years ago and it was still usable. </p>
  
  <p>Something similar for Oracle would already be a big help for our developement team so I'd appreciate some pointers to good refactoring tools for Oracle if they do exist. 
  Thanks,
  Crocked</p>