If you want to use JDeveloper 11g for Soa and/or BPM Development you need to download the SOA JDev Extension for the SOA Composite Designer and the BPM JDev extension for BPM Studio.

In all the documentation you'll find, you see an explanation on how to download them using the Help/Update utilities of JDeveloper. This might be neat and user-friendly for updating one JDeveloper instance where you have a fast internet access. But it is not so handy if you have to provide these extensions to multiple JDeveloper instances for a course for example. Then it is handy when you're able to download them and provide them on a stick.

I found these files on this JDeveloper extension page (just using Google).
So I downloaded the latest versions on my harddisk at home, where I have a good internet access. I hope this page is on-line indefinately.

Just read on Sue Harpers blog that SQL Developer Datamodeller 3.0 went production. It's downloadable from its OTN-page. I'm happy to know it's a free download. End 2008 I used the beta version to model a datamodel for a project I did then. I found it a very nice tool, a good replacement for the ERD/Datamodelling capabilities of Designer. There were a few "misses, and the main ones I had were:

• Generation of pl/sql packages and functions was not possible
• Subversion support was poor: when you save a project it recreates directories to save the xml-artifacts in. Recreating directory means removal of the .svn folders, which breaks your svn working copy.

In the new features list I saw promissing statements that these should be solved now. You should be able to generate packages and functions and there is even Subversion Integration (not only support): you can see pending changes, compare models and it shoud "recognize versioned designs". Well, isn't that great?

Since it's free and since it's a really good modelling tool, I think it is a must-use on every project that uses a datamodel. Haven't used it yet? Re-engineer your ERD by importing your datamodel from the database. It gives a quick insight in the datamodel for newcomers in your project.

See also for an early adopter of Sql Developer 3.0 the SqlDeveloper OTN-page. It includes the Datamodeller.