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Roll with the Changes |
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JimWankowski
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Friday, September 28, 2007 3:16 PM
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One of the questions I get quite a bit from customers is; do we have the ability to compare data and/or have the ability to compare DDL files to what’s currently in the DB2 catalog? As of V3.0 of TOAD for DB2 the ...
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Further Travels in Betaland |
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MikeA
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Friday, September 28, 2007 3:13 PM
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Well, I decided that Linuxtown wasn’t going anywhere very fast and with the all the SRs I was leaving in my wake I soon would not be welcome by the locals so I decided I would take it on the lamb over to Windowsville for a while. Besides it was looking like the local disk array was going to pin a power supply failure on me.& ...
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SQL, Fast & Tastes Good |
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JeffSmith
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9/27/2007
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A US-based fast food chain apparently has a new advertising campaign running. I’m not exactly sure what it is supposed to be for, and most of their commercials are pretty confusing. They do have one that I like< ...
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Toad Subsets Data |
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Bert
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Monday, September 24, 2007 7:43 AM
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A common task for DBAs is to create a test or development environment that has a subset of production data for testing and development purposes. As usual, Toad
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The Attack of the Clones! |
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JimWankowski
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Monday, September 17, 2007 11:28 AM
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This week I am going to switch gears over to the big iron and talk about DB2 z/OS. IBM has been making great strides in the area of schema management. As any mainframe DBA knows, the process of having to make a seemingly simple schema change can result in a very complex combination of DDL, Utilities and batch processes. These changes can result in applicati ...
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In what version did Oracle add that feature? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, September 14, 2007 11:08 AM
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I get this question a lot. I am teaching a class and a student asks: "When did Oracle add autonomous transactions?" Or the INDICES of clause. Or – who knows what?
Seeing as I am totally obses ...
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A SQL Performance History from AWR |
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RichardTo
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Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:51 PM
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I have been working on SQL Tuning research for more than 10 years, but my focus has changed to time-series forecast technology in the last two years. Recently, Oracle’s AWR and other database vendor’s statistics/metrics repository have drawn my attention. The relatively low cost of keeping performance statistics in databases, combined wi ...
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Toad – not just for Oracle |
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JeffSmith
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9/10/2007
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Toad® has been a popular Oracle development and administration tool for the past decade. In fact, the original trademark for our favorite little guy was ‘T.O.A.D’ – an acronym that stood for “the Tool for Oracle Appli ...
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Messing With 11g 32bit RAC |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, September 05, 2007 10:25 AM
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Well, the 32 bit 11g beta is officially over with the GA of the 11g 32 bit release on the Oracle download site. I replaced my beta copy with the production release and started playing about 2 weeks ago. I tho ...
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Toad Simplifies ANSI Joins |
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Bert
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Tuesday, September 04, 2007 4:06 AM
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Starting with Oracle 9i, Oracle recommends that SQL developers use the ANSI join syntax instead of the Oracle proprietary (+) syntax. There are several reasons for this recommendation, including:
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FT-Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Or, FTP with Toad |
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JeffSmith
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8/31/2007
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It’s no secret that I am a die hard Toad® fanatic. There are many reasons for this, but the one I want to talk about today is one of Toad’s best kept secrets: a commercial-grade FTP client built right into Toad!
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The importance of SQL scalability testing |
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JimWankowski
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Thursday, August 30, 2007 1:26 PM
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As we all know, there are many factors that influence the performance of your application. Proper memory allocations, physical design, how the SQL is written and workload all affect the way your queries perform. One of most overlooked parts of testing an application is testing queries under production workload conditions.< ...
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Quseful #7: Kill those infinite loops! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007 12:42 PM
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I don't know about you, but I sometimes write code that (inadvertently, not on purpose) contains an infinite loop. So I run my program and Toad goes off into never-never land, with Oracle chewing up CPU cycles so intently that it is hard to connect as SYS and kill the session.
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Oracle 11g Introduces Invisible Indexes |
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Bert
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Monday, August 27, 2007 6:09 AM
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As I wrote last week, Oracle 11g has a plethora of really great new features. One that should really hit a home run with data warehousing DBAs is “Invisible Indexes.” The name is not a joke – they are exactly what they say. An invisible index is ignored by the query optimizer when forming an explain plan for a SELECT statement, ...
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The Toad Family brings home a new Tadpole |
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JeffSmith
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8/24/2007
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For more than 10 years now, Toad has been THE tool for Oracle developers, DBAs, and analysts. A few years ago, Quest began introducing versions of Toad that brought native support to popular platforms such as
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Oracle 11g Improves Partitioning |
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Bert
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007 4:21 AM
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Oracle 11g has a plethora of great new features. One area that has improved with each of the last four releases has been partitioning, i.e. the method to break larger tables into smaller, more manageable and efficient sub-tables. While it was originally touted as a boon for just the data warehousing world, partitioning no ...
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Quseful #6: Generate collections of random values |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, August 17, 2007 9:27 AM
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You will find in this Quseful a package that will generate/return collections of random values of strings, numbers and dates. It also contains a "self-test" random_verifier procedure that you can run to verify "at a glance" that the values being generated seem
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Welcome to the Toad for DB2 blog |
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JimWankowski
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007 10:41 AM
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Welcome to my inaugural blog for Toad® for DB2. Many of you may not be aware that Toad is now a multiplatform solution. I plan to discuss subjects across both DB2 running on the LUW platf ...
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Oracle 11g Adds Virtual Columns & Indexes |
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Bert
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007 6:18 AM
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Oracle 11g is out for Linux – and like every new release, there’s tons of cool new stuff. So over the next few weeks, I will write about some of Oracle 11g’s new features. This week, I’ll look at Virtual Columns and Virtual Indexes.
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How Quest SQL Optimizer works with Hints |
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RichardTo
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007 10:28 AM
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Today database vendors are more willing to provide a means for the end user to influence the decision of which execution plan to use for a SQL statement. They provide this because database optimizers cannot guarantee that they the will generate the best execution plan for a given SQL statement. However, when you do apply Optimization Hints you ...
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What is Oracle ASM and does Toad for Oracle support it? |
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Bert
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Wednesday, August 08, 2007 5:35 AM
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We all know that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” so I provided a few pictures (shown below) to try and briefly yet succinctly explain what ASM is and how it’s different than the previous ways of managing disk space within Oracle.
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Quseful #5: Does that string contain a valid number? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, August 06, 2007 2:01 PM
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I offer in this Quseful (Quick and Useful) a package that you can use to determine if a string contains a valid integer, number, binary_float or binary_double (note: if you are not running Oracle 10g, you will need to comment out the binary_* versions in this package). It is based on code I wrote about back in 1997 (available
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DBA Hardware Options “Over the Years” |
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Bert
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Thursday, August 02, 2007 6:55 PM
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Ever hear people say they miss the good ole days – when times and things were much simpler than now? Well the same is true for Oracle DBAs, the early 90’s (circa 1993) were much simpler in terms of hardware selection for an Oracle server as summarized below.
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The Joys of Beta Testing |
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MikeA
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Monday, July 30, 2007 9:48 AM
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I am participating in the Oracle11g beta. The next time I tell you I am going to do a beta please lock me up until the fit passes. I have subjected myself to this abuse since Oracle8, usually tied with writing or updating a book. Maybe I am getting smarter as I get older as I am not (currently) involved in a book project although there may be one or two mor ...
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Toad Database Tune and Optimize Check-List |
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Bert
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Monday, July 23, 2007 6:53 AM
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I use Toad® for Oracle almost everyday to tune and optimize problematic databases for customers, partners and friends. And I noticed that I followed a pattern – which seemed consistent across all such attempts. And although I wrote the whitepaper “
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Welcome to the new TPC-E Benchmark |
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Bert
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Monday, July 16, 2007 10:48 AM
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One of the most widely recognized and often quoted database benchmarks is the TPC-C. For over 14 years, the TPC-C has been the industry standard OLTP test; however, it’s very clearly showing its advanced age. The TPC-C does not adequately mimic today’s ...
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Toad for Oracle: Not Just an Oracle IDE |
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JeffSmith
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7/2/2007
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I’ve been working with Toad® for several years now, and even now that I’m NOT directly associated with the Toad development team, my Windows taskbar usually has at least 1 if not 2 Toad programs hanging around. To be honest, if someone were to take Toad away f ...
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Switching Data Modeling Tools? Ouch! |
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Bert
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Monday, June 25, 2007 7:52 AM
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Probably the single most painful task in data modeling (or any modeling for that matter) is switching tools. Forget the high direct costs like purchasing licenses and the obvious indirect costs of retraining your staff, because it’s the migration of all your meta-data from one tool to the other that looms large on t ...
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Confessions of a Hypocritical Programmer |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, June 22, 2007 11:19 AM
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That's me. A hypocritical programmer. And I am here to admit it, to make a confession.
Hypocrisy has got to be one of the most infuriating traits of human beings.
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Quest Recursive SQL Transformation Technology |
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RichardTo
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007 4:58 AM
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Quest Recursive SQL Transformation technology is an innovative AI technology that simulates human SQL transformation technique. It incorporates a set of transformation rules to transform SQL statements on a section-by-section basis. This replaces the trial and error method used by human to rewrite the syntax of a SQL statement. Each t ...
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Can You Take a Hint? |
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MikeA
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Thursday, June 14, 2007 10:14 AM
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Hints in Oracle have been around since version 8. Hints are like compiler directives that tell Oracle what path to take when optimizing a SQL statement (generally speaking.) However, Oracle will ignore the hint if it can’t do it or it is formatted poorly.
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The Cost of Poor Database Design |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:32 AM
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I’ve been searching for a definitive answer to the question: “What is the cost of poor database design?” No doubt you have all seen the cost/benefit graphs for fixing application problems and the pyramid showing how up to 90 percent of performance issues in a running database are SQL and ind ...
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Feuerstein in Buenos Aires and Magic Tricks |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, May 09, 2007 11:24 AM
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It is Wednesday, May 09, 2007 and I am sitting in the Admiral's Club at the Buenos Aires airport. I just finished two days in this lovely city. My first day was spent enjoying the chilly, but very sunny afternoon, walking for four hours around the city. It is a busy, busy place with many buses throwing way too much gritty exhaust into the air (hey, ...
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Using Cross-Instance Parallel Query |
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MikeA
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Friday, May 04, 2007 11:23 AM
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With the use of RAC on the rise it is time to talk about the use of a feature very under-utilized in Oracle. This feature I refer to is cross-instance parallel query. Many times on site visits I see people using single-instance parallel query, but no one whose system I reviewed has used cross-instance parallel. Some weren’t aware it was available ...
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