With the advent of DB2 10, IBM dropped its much-maligned Control Center tools in favor of a free version of IBM Data Studio.  I started using Data Studio back in April and wrote about some positive first impressions here.  But I shouldn’t have blogged so soon.

For occasional use with certain tasks on fast hardware, Data Studio is fine.  But if you want to get a lot done quickly, it can really get in the way.  It’s just too bloated, too slow, too cumbersome, too slow, too awkward, and too slow.  Did I mention that it’s slow?

So I find myself doing even more now with the command line.  When I need a GUI tool, I’ve gone back to using a tool I wrote myself, TOAD, and free tools like DbVisualizer and Eclipse DTP.

Data Studio has been around for awhile, and IBM is clearly committed to it.  But there remains a lot of room for improvement.  Now that Data Studio is the built-in default, I hope IBM gets on that.  And quickly.