When use auto-complete assistence at local database (IBM Informix) , it take long time to load the metadata, plus of 2 minutes for a environment with less of 2.000 tables.
With Squirrel this is up of 20 seconds...
Probably needs some SQL tweeks for each specific database , because isn't difficult (at least for Informix) run a simple and fast query to load most of metadata (table+columns) instead use the jdbc interface for that...