Oracle Corp. is working on a tool to provide a complete life cycle for building, managing, and updating database applications, a company executive revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here in San Francisco on Wednesday morning.

Called Project Columbus, the effort is intended to provide for management of database objects and enable developers to code in a variety of styles, said Chuck Rozwat, Oracle executive vice president of server technology. Also featured is an application module based on Oracle?s HTML DB Web development tool to provide a single place to build out database applications, Rozwat said.

Set for release by June 2005, the tool is intended to be graphical and easy to use.

?The goal is really to provide a tool for the bulk of our installed base, which is really database developers,? said Rozwat. Database tools have been neglected of late by Oracle, he said.

Asked if Oracle was looking to compete with Microsoft Corp.?s Visual Studio toolset in the area of easy-to-use development tools, Rozwat said the company is integrating with Microsoft tools but also is building its own.

?We?re always responding to Microsoft, which kind of sets the standard for easy-to-use tools,? Rozwat said.