Embarcadero aims to attract Eclipse SQL developers

After buying up two key Eclipse executives in advance of this week's EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, California, Embarcadero has released its PowerSQL database-management product.

PowerSQL is Embarcadero's fourth tool built on the open-source Eclipse framework, and the company claimed this new release will improve productivity for the growing number of application developers who are becoming involved with SQL development.

Embarcadero hopes to attract developers not traditionally used to writing SQL code to its latest tool, which it said features a rich SQL integrated development environment with code-completion, real-time error-checking, code-formatting and object-validation tools to help streamline coding tasks.

With the growing sophistication of J2EE, Ruby on Rails and other development frameworks increasingly dependent on databases, Embarcadero said that application developers require greater toolset power, such as real-time SQL syntax validation and search features, to help streamline project organisation and maintenance when working at the underlying database-management system (DBMS) layer.

"We are seeing an upsurge in the number of traditional developers who are taking on more database work and using SQL on a somewhat regular basis," said John F Andrews, president of market research firm Evans Data Corporation. "According to research we conducted in September 2007, SQL is the second most popular language among Eclipse users, with 64 percent using it at least some of the time."

Embarcadero PowerSQL runs on both Windows and Linux and can be installed as a standalone application or as an Eclipse plug-in. It is available now in personal, standard and professional versions, with annual subscription-based options costing from £6.58 per month, per developer.