DevOps, CI/CD and Automation

It is no secret that despite the fact that Oracle Designer is one of the best CASE tools around (it makes JDeveloper look like a joke) Oracle has never been able to effectively monetize it. Presumably that is why Oracle is no longer upgrading the product to support new Oracle functionality.

On the other hand, Oracle Designer still has potential to deliver a lot of value for Oracle.

There is a committed group of users who push to use the Oracle database and tools because we can leverage them with Oracle Designer. Working with Designer locks you in to an Oracle technology stack which can only be good for Oracle.

All of that will be lost over the next few years if Oracle Designer does not continue to move with the rest of the Oracle technology stack.

So why doesn't Oracle open source Oracle Designer? Just devote one or two people to support the community and see where it goes?

If Oracle does that I think that there will be a lot of investment into Designer by companies that have already made huge investments into the product and need to keep it up to date. It would also become, together with Oracle XE, a standard part of computer science curriculums, driving Oracle use worldwide.

I think some of the obvious things that would happen if you open sourced the product are:

1. Rewrite the generation code in PL/SQL to make it easier to extend and enhance

2. Modify TAPI generation to support Merge and Object Types

3. Translation into many languages

4. Generators for a wide variety of tools including HTML DB, J2EE

5. Modify product to support Oracle's SYS level object types like Anydata and XMLTYPE

6. Object class diagrammer

What's the down side? Why not do it?