Client access app of choice

What are people's applications of choice for end-user client ad-hoc access to Oracle data? We're running 8.0.5, soon to be 8.1.6 on Unix (Digital Unix), and being academic, we are very Unix-centric on our central systems. We run Solaris on our web servers, and Digital/Compaq Tru64 Unix on our interactive login/programming/etc. systems.

Most of our development work, in practice, is done in Perl with DBI on Unix systems, which makes life very easy to get to and from Oracle data.

However, we have a growing need for certain folks to have quick direct access to raw data, outside of our applications. Most of these people are Windows-based, and SQL-Plus is a bit of a nightmare interface for these kinds of people.

What do people like to use for end-user data access for things like this? I've looked at things like linking in ODBC tables through MS Access, which works pretty well, if a little clunky. It also seems yucky that getting ODBC connection setup is a rather large effort. I took a quick look at Oracle Discoverer 3i, but that seems enormously heavyweight. And it wants me to dedicate a Windows NT machine for its exclusive use as a session server or something.

Any tips appreciated! Thanks.

-Rick

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|                 Rick Osterberg   osterber_at_fas.harvard.edu                |
|         Database Applications Specialist     FAS Computer Services       |


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