When talking tools to help with SQL Tuning the question on SQLTXPLAIN vs SQLd360 comes out very often. “What’s the difference?”, “Which one should I use?”, “Why another tool?” are probably the top ones 🙂

I’ll try to make a fair and (as much as possible) unbiased comparison between the two on some general aspects. If you want to know of any specific area just let me know in the comments.

Aspect	SQLTXPLAIN	SQLd360
Installation	Requires installation. Creates two schemas that serve as metadata and code repository, they need to be present every time the tool is executed	No installation, at the end of the execution no evidence is left behind
Source code	Mainly PL/SQL, unwrapped (clear text). Code is Oracle property	SQL scripts, clear text, true open source released under GPL. Code available on GitHub
Main Goal	Automate every aspect of diagnostic collection for SQL tuning	Same as SQLT, but less “obsessive” 🙂
Main Focus	Execution plan generation, why CBO generated plan X,Y,Z (includes custom testcase, very flexible)	Execution plan generation (but a little less than SQLT) and how plans execute at runtime
Main advantage	Includes every bit of info needed to drill into CBO decisions, unlikely the need to go back and collect anything else	Makes diagnostic consumption faster and easier because of data visualization, lots of focus on runtime
Main disadvantage	Requires installation. Not much focus on execution time (“same plan different performance” type of cases harder to deal with)	Might miss some information under rare circumstances

Outside the comparison table, what we use today: SQLd360
Reason(s):

1. No installation.
2. Root Cause Analysis of CBO decisions usually belongs to Oracle Support (for the most part), SQL Tuning in the real world focuses on easier aspects of plan generation, thus lower need for strong focus on it.
3. Performance data available in Oracle grows by release, charting allows quick and way more effective consumption of large amount of such data.