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Q&A from Webcast on using Indexes to Boost Performance |
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MikeA
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Thursday, January 24, 2008 2:20 PM
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I recently gave a webcast about using indexes to boost your application performance, of course at the end of the webcast we took questions, unfortunately I wasn’t able to anser all of the questions so I pulled the ones I felt were most important and decided to answer them here in my blog. For the full webcast see :
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A Complete Solution for Oracle DBAs |
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JeffSmith
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1/21/2008
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How often are you offered less work or fewer responsibilities? Rarely does that ever happen, and if it does, it could be a bad sign! Well, as a database administrator, your job gets more and more complex every day even as RDBMS vendors keep adding ‘automated management’ features. On top of all your day-to-day tasks and preventive maintenance you perform, your most ...
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Questions from the Instant Replay Webcast |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:56 AM
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Well, here I sit at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic heading for London and then on to Abu Dhabi. It seems like just yesterday I was doing a webcast for the Performance Allstars series on Instant Replay and the use of history to find problems, oh wait, that was yesterday!
During the webcast many excellent questions where asked concerning historical data c ...
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Toad for Data Analysis – Tips ‘N’ Tricks |
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JeffSmith
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1/11/2008
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One might be tempted to think that with such a young tool like Toad for Data Analysis (TDA), that it would be a bit early to start trumpeting its advanced features and ‘hidden’ productivity boosters. In this case, one would be very wrong! Although Toad for Data Analysis is only up to release 1.1, it is built on top of Toad for SQL Server and Toad for DB2’s award w ...
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Toad’s New & Improved Database Browser |
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Bert
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Thursday, January 03, 2008 11:08 AM
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There are many different types of Toad® users, and since job titles and descriptions vary so widely, it’s tough to say a typical Toad user looks like this and thus needs this. Thus Toad has evolved over time to meet the ever growing needs of our customers. Quest has two key Toad Yahoo discussion groups to fa ...
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Single quotes and CLOBs in 10.2.0.3 |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007 5:41 PM
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I usually write about best practice principles and general issues.
Today I thought I would share a bit of my pain with you on a very specific topic: single quotes and CLOBs, and specifically on O ...
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Custom Data Reporting with Toad for DB2 |
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JimWankowski
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007 10:57 AM
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One of the nicer features within Toad® for DB2 is the wide array of reporting capabilities. There is a constant requirement for managerial level reports that need to be run on a regular basis. Many of these reports are generating using reporting tools like QMF, Crystal Reporting, etc. Toad’s data reporting facility p ...
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Speed Up Toad |
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Bert
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Monday, December 17, 2007 1:20 PM
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It’s not uncommon for software to increase in install size and memory footprint over the years – and Toad®
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More Toys for DBAs |
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JeffSmith
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12/12/2007
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I’ve been promising to deliver a write-up on Toad’s new support for Statspack, and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it! Statspack has been around since the 8i release of Oracle.
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Error Management functions and features for PL/SQL Developers |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:41 PM
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Winter is descending on Chicago; we had our first snow (flurries, really) on Thanksgiving Day, and the sun is weak. For many, this is a depressing time – and I mean that the lack of that and cold actually does make people feel depressed. Per ...
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Super & Sub Type Option #1 |
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Bert
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Friday, November 30, 2007 3:50 PM
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When we create a super-and-sub type (a.k.a. Inheritance) entity relationship in a logical data model, it’s very clear what the business requirements being communicated are – that different subsets of attributes comprise the “cumulative entity” being modeled depending upon the business context. &l ...
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Upgrading to 9.5? Read this first! |
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JeffSmith
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11/29/2007
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I was initially planning on writing up a review of the new Statspack support in Toad version 9.5 for my next blog, but I wanted to make sure all of our Toad users were aware of the new installation process first!
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My Favorite Templates – in one convenient file |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:24 PM
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Would you like to increase productivity, improve code quality, and ensure that standards are being followed? Of course you would! And one of the best ways to do that is to rely heavily on Toad's Code Templates (similar functionality exists in SQL Navigator as well).
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Multi-Location Script Executions |
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JimWankowski
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007 8:24 PM
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In many cases there is a need to create an object or to execute an SQL statement in multiple locations. The group execute option in TOAD for DB2 allows you to execute a script against multiple environments with one easy step.&nb ...
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Questions I hear over and over and over… |
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JeffSmith
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11/20/2007
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I have worn many different hats here at Quest, and recently put on another in the Sales organization. Regardless of what my official title has been, talking to our Toad customers has always been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career. I decided a long time ago that I would do all I could to master Toad and share my findings with others. I hope to ne ...
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Oracle 11g on a notebook: Tread Lightly |
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Bert
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Friday, November 16, 2007 10:41 AM
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This blog posting is not meant to demean or slander the Oracle database in anyway. I’ve staked almost my entire career on Oracle technologies – and I intend to finish these last 7-10 years doing more Oracle stuff. To quote a funny Saturday Night Live skit: “Oracle has been very, very good to me.” So my comments are mo ...
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Catching up with me at Oracle OpenWorld |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Sunday, November 11, 2007 11:13 AM
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Sorry about the late posting, but if you are interested in attending my presentations, here's the info:
Session ID: S290723
Session Title: Break Your Addiction to ...
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Expedite Saving Data via Toad |
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Bert
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Tuesday, November 06, 2007 8:14 AM
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Probably one of the most useful and frequented tasks performed with Toad® for Oracle is saving data to a file, such as comma delimited text (or any of the other numerous formats supported). It’s a relatively easy feature to find – you simply depress the “right hand mouse” (RHM) ...
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Oracle Parallel Query Abuse |
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Bert
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007 6:46 AM
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Oracle’s Parallel Query Option (PQO) is a fantastic tool, but much like any good tool, it can very easily be used in the wrong situation or simply abused. In those cases, PQO can actually make database performance much worse. Let’s examine some common misuses or misperceptions regarding optimal and efficient PQO usage.
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TheThree Letter Word |
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JimWankowski
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Monday, October 29, 2007 2:27 PM
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I just got back from the IBM IOD conference in Las Vegas; it was a great show. Every year there is usually some buzz about what is “hot” with DB2. This year’s buzz was heard loud and clear – XML was being discus ...
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Running Toad on Linux! |
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Bert
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Monday, October 22, 2007 4:09 AM
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OK – now that I grabbed your full attention with that snappy title, let’s see just how to run the Toad® on your Linux desktop or notebook. Let’s say that you’re running Redhat, CentOS, SuSE or Ubuntu Linux on your PC, let’s further assume that you would like to run Toad either ...
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A Sneak Peak |
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JeffSmith
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10/15/2007
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They say time flies when you’re having fun, and it seems like 2007 has gone by at a record pace. 2007 has seen quite a few exciting developments in the ‘Toad World’ arena. In addition to Toad World itself, we have seen a new unit testing tool for PL/SQL and a version of Toad made just for analysts released. In addition we&r ...
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DB2 Day to Day |
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JimWankowski
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Friday, October 12, 2007 11:13 AM
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Hey DB2’ers,
I had a busy week last week speaking at the Central Canadian DB2 Users Group in Toronto
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What about a Self-learning SQL Optimizer? |
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RichardTo
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:45 AM
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There are at least two database vendors are trying to build self-learning SQL optimizers. The idea is to use actual statistics from executed SQL statements to rectify the future cost estimation of the same or similar SQL statements. It seems like a good idea, but, you will find that their existing self-learning ...
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Team Coding??? |
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JeffSmith
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10/3/2007
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Every software product has a feature or widget that is extremely powerful, but finds a way to confuse more people than it enlightens.
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Toad Sometimes Slow on Oracle 10g? |
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Bert
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007 9:44 AM
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Often people will write or call to relate that Toad® seems sluggish when working against Oracle 10g databases – and that creating new connections in particular seems to take an unreasonably long time. They are often especially frustrated since this problem did not occur with Oracle versions prior to 10g. So what is T ...
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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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