Major Description
The Phoenix client jar currently needs to be put on the boot classpath of external SQL tools in order to function correctly, while most JDBC drivers do not have this requirement.
For example, in SQuirreL there is an option to provide the path to the JDBC driver jar file when defining a JDBC driver. This approach doesn't work with Phoenix due to it dependence on loading classes and the hbase-default.xml file via the context classloader.
For installations of external tools where users don't have the rights/abilities/knowledge necessary to add an external jar file to the boot classpath, this causes a genuine issue for using Phoenix.