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F-what? |
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JeffSmith
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11/20/2008
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After working with Toad for almost a decade (I think I first saw it as a new grad in ’99…), I tend to start taking things for granted when I do demonstrations for customers or present at conferences on the beauty of Toad. It’s very easy to get excited about CRUD Matrices and the beauty of PL/SQL debuggers, but overlook the critical core features that users often miss out on.
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Run Toad off a USB Flash Drive |
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Bert
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 1:32 PM
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Lot’s of people have asked “How can I setup Toad to run off a flash drive?” The reason for this question varies in nature and intent by requestor – but the general concept is that some users need the ability to carry Toad with them. Some are contractors who must use whatever computer and/or desk is open that day. Some are database developers who must travel around their company to perform or assist w ...
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Speeding-Up Oracle on Your Notebook PC |
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Bert
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 7:29 AM
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Just a quick blog this week – some relatively easy suggestions on how to make Oracle run as fast as possible on minimal computer setups such as a notebook PC. My goal is simply to squeeze as much performance blood from the Oracle turnip as possible when deployed on limited capacity equipment. The suggestions below should work for most operating systems, including Windows, Mac-OS and Linux – simply interpret and ...
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Just Make Oracle Go Faster |
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Bert
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008 8:25 AM
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Catchy title – huh? But don’t laugh, in today’s hectic world many database professionals (whether DBA’s or developers – and sometimes even end users) just wish that the Oracle database would go faster. That may seem self evident – but let’s just accept that premise for now. So what does this mean for Toad users?
Toad offers numerous database monitoring, ...
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Getting to know the Query Builder in Toad for Data Analysis |
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dnorwood
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11/5/2008 3:04 PM
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Query Builder is the heart and soul of Toad for Data Analysis. We've spent lots of time and effort working to make it very useful and intuitive. Recently, in version 2.0 of Toad for Data Analysis, we introduced a few new features including reverse engineering SQL to a Query Builder model, creation of DDL scripts and better connection awareness. The linked doc is a very nice write up that Shawn Pickett (Senior Developer) and Alan Bala (Development Team Lead) have put together.
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Unicode Migration |
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Johannes
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11/3/2008 9:24 AM
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Migrating to a database that supports Unicode is a challenge. You are safe if you are currently using US7ASCII for you Oracle database because Oracle provides a mechanism with ALTER DATABASE SET CHARACTERSET UTF8 which allows you by just bouncing the database to switch to this new character set. But what if you are currently on a different character set? In Europe we have a bunch of WE8 (Western Europ ...
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Congratulations to the newest Oracle Magazine PL/SQL Developer of the Year! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, November 03, 2008 8:03 AM
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As I travel certain parts of the globe doing presentations on PL/SQL, I meet many extremely talented PL/SQL programmers – people who meet the most complex challenges you can imagine with a deft combination of intense creativity, hard work, and of course Oracle PL/SQL.
Oracle Magazine names only one as the PL/SQL Developer of the Year at each Oracle Open World, and this year the award was g ...
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Play games to become a better developer! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:23 AM
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Part 2: The Game of Mastermind
Software development is one heck of a serious job. It turns out, however, that there are several games you can play to improve the quality of code you write. This is the second of two blog entries that introduce you to two of my favorite brain development and training games:
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Inside the application data directory |
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Mauritz
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Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:28 AM
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If you have ever looked in the Toad data directory you were probably a little bit bewildered about all the stuff in there. This article will try to shed some light on what all the files in there are used for by the Toad application.
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Oracle + VMware = Success Part II |
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Bert
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Wednesday, October 22, 2008 2:40 AM
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Last week I wrote about how simply adjusting various virtualized infrastructure default settings that a database could perform up to 440% better. Of course “ your mileage” will vary, but the key point is ...
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Code completion revealed |
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Mauritz
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008 5:44 PM
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From the first version of Toad we have always had some form of code completion (It was originally called Toad insight or something like that) but it has always been a fairly simple affair where you either got a list of columns in select statements or a long list of objects of many different types completely unaffected by the context in which you invoke the code completion. Starting in 4.0 the c ...
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Connection and transaction handling explained |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 12:10 PM
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In an application like Toad connection and transaction handling will invariant become a complicate affair. During the years we have been working on this we have tried to make it as intuitive as possible so that you usually don't have to think about it. However, in some cases you can still run into problems so this post will try to explain how we handle connections and transactions so that you can avoid the pitfalls.
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Toad version numbers explained |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 12:08 PM
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Version numbers between the different components of the different products can be pretty confusing ever for us who work on it. Before 3.0 of the Core (The part of Toad that is shared between the products) each product had it's own release schedule and with that each had it's own release version of this. After release 3.0 we now try to coordinate releases between the different products (They are usually staggered ...
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Reducing startup time |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 12:08 PM
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For the upcoming 4.1 release I have actually been able to spend quite a lot of time to reduce startup time in Toad and hopefully there should be a quite noticeable difference. One of the changes made is to make the initialization multithreaded so the improvement should be even more pronounced if you have more than one CPU core.
There are a couple of other things you can do yourself in both 4 ...
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Toad nomenclature |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 12:06 PM
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We have a bunch of terms referring to different aspects of the Toad application internally and I thought I would share some with you because it's not that uncommon that it slips out in the Yahoo Boards when we talk about it so why not just go through them and explain them.
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Command line reference |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 12:03 PM
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The documentation of what command line options are available on the Toad.exe is not necessarily that well covered in the documentation. True there is rarely any need to specify anything on it unless something goes wrong. I just thought I'd go through what is available.
First of all the format. Toad allows any parameters to be specified regardless of if it knows what they are or not because s ...
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The history of Toad for SQL Server |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 11:55 AM
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I recently took some time to look through the different releases we have made of Toad over the years since we started and just thought I would share it with you guys. I chose the Toad for SQL Server release because that was the one which had made the most releases (For instance
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Starting this blog |
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Mauritz
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Monday, October 20, 2008 11:44 AM
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Every once in a while I've been writing Toad stuff on my personal blog and I figured it is time to stop doing that and try to do this blog into something a little bit more useful. Entries in this blog will also be cross posted on the site Toad Wrangling
I will try to write tips and tricks about how to use Toad as I can think of them ...
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Play games to become a better developer! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, October 20, 2008 7:01 AM
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Part 1: The Game of Set
Software development is one heck of a serious job. It turns out, however, that there are several games you can play to improve the quality of code you write. This is the first of two blog entries that introduce you to two of my favorite brain development and training games: Set and Mastermin ...
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Doing SQL in PL/SQL: key resource from Bryn Llewellyn |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:09 AM
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One of the highlights of Oracle Open World 2008 for me was the presentation by Bryn Llewellyn (PL/SQL Product Manager) on “Doing SQL in PL/SQL.”
Bryn surely has the most thorough and clear understanding of the PL/SQL language of anyone I have met (definitely including me).
His talk was detailed ...
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It’s the Little Things… |
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JeffSmith
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10/3/2008
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We often spend a lot of time trumpeting the sexy little widgets in our database tools and overlook the little things that really aid in the development of our applications or even just writing the mundane queries that fill up our day.
I’d like to just spend a quick 10 minutes on letting you know about a cool little feature that Toad for Data Analysis offers for writing your querie ...
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Control Convergence by Example |
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JohnWeathington
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Friday, October 03, 2008
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Control convergence – the effort of staying in compliance while reducing the number of controls – is a big trend in the industry today. In this article, we demonstrate how the data professional can support a control convergence effort, by way of fictitious case study.
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Compelling Features for Upgrading to Toad v9.7 |
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JeffSmith
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9/25/2008
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So, another version of Toad has been released. It happens a few times a year. If you’re lucky it’s up to you if and when you want to upgrade to get your bug fixes or new features. If you’re in a larger organization, there’s a standards committee that decides who gets what when. I thought I’d spend a few minutes to document what I see to be the key features available in v9.7 t ...
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Policy Data Management in 3 Stages |
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JohnWeathington
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
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In this article, we talk about policies – an important area of your companies governance, risk, and compliance program. We discuss what a good policy looks like, and how you can evolve a policy data management system in 3 stages.
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Configuring Toad’s Team Coding with Subversion |
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JohnPocknell
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Monday, September 22, 2008
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With Toad for Oracle 9.7 now available, I thought I’d cover how to configure and use Subversion with Toad’s code sharing utility – Team Coding. We had a lot of requests for this integration and here it is !
The Subversion implementation in Toad allows you to use the conventional file-based check-out and check-in via the Editor’s File Open bu ...
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For loops or While loops to scan collections? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, September 22, 2008 9:21 AM
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I have generally recommended in the past that whenever you are writing code to iterate through the elements of a collection, you should use a while loop, combined with the FIRST-NEXT or LAST-PRIOR collection methods.
The key advantage of this approach is that the code will not raise a NO_DATA_FOUND exception if your collection is sparse (there is an index value be ...
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People Make Mistakes |
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JohnWeathington
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
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Human beings, by their very nature, make mistakes. Even seasoned professionals make simple errors on occasion. In this article we explore the “mistake database”, an architecture to help your company minimize errors.
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RAC the Casba |
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Bert
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008 5:44 AM
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On many occasions, people will email or call me to get help with perceived RAC connectivity issues for various client applications – Toad and other Quest products included. Now some times they may have setups that we’ve not pre-tested, so they have a potential bug – or at least another regression testing scenario for us. But many times, it’s simply a SQL*Net configuration issue. While it’s easy to dr ...
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New Search tool |
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ToadWorldAdmin
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9/10/2008 12:03 PM
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We know that a lot of users have been frustrated by the search that was being used by Toad World. It's no fun to know that Toad World probably has the answer to your question, the white paper or utiltiy you're looking for and not able to find it. Well, we were feeling your pain, too. Toad World has so much content that we were having problems finding stu ...
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Speed Up Toad - Updated |
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Bert
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008 3:38 AM
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It’s not uncommon for software to increase in install size and memory footprint over the years – and Toad is no exception. But, that does not mean that these newer versions have to run more slowly. We take great pride in keeping Toad expedient as it matures. Thus do not simply assume that if your Toad is running slower these days – that it’s just the “cost of progress”. Most often t ...
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A Question from our Quest SQL Optimizer User |
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RichardTo
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Thursday, September 04, 2008 1:50 AM
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Recently, we got a question from a customer:
“Why does adding a ||'' to the end of a key value improve performance... in this case significantly, this query runs in 187 milliseconds regularly where without the ||'' it takes minutes to run... This is the only modification in the result set from SQ ...
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Getting Risk Right – How Probable is Your Probability? |
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JohnWeathington
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Thursday, September 04, 2008
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Inaccurate risk probabilities can wreak havoc on the applicability of your risk database. Why go through the trouble of setting it up, if bad probability entries render your database unusable? In this article, we explore the importance of getting the risk probability correct, and ways to improve your accuracy.
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Automated Maintenance |
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JimWankowski
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Wednesday, September 03, 2008 7:31 AM
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Automated maintenance began with DB2 LUW 8.2. At this time the behavior of automated utilities had to be controlled manually either through the Control Center or the automation wizard. Now with DB2 9.5 automation of RUNSTATS and REORG commands can be controlled by an XML document referred to as an “automatic maintenance policy” These policies control which objects are consi ...
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What’s Coming in Toad 9.7 - Part 2 |
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JohnPocknell
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Friday, August 29, 2008
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It’s almost that time again as another exciting new release of Toad draws closer! We’ve decided that, rather than let you wait until Toad 9.7 is released before you see what’s new, we’ll give you a little fore-taste now! In this final blog (
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Beyond Compliance – Understanding Risk |
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JohnWeathington
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
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Compliance usually starts with a fire drill, however intelligent companies take the time to step back and put their compliance into perspective. Risk is the key to understanding and optimizing your compliance program. In this article, we discuss risk as an evolution from compliance, and look at some ways to model it in the enterprise.
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What’s Coming in Toad 9.7 - Part 1 |
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JohnPocknell
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Friday, August 22, 2008
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It’s almost that time again as another exciting new release of Toad draws closer !
We’ve decided that, rather than let you wait until Toad 9.7 is released before you see what’s new, we’ll give you a little preview now !
The main objectives of this release are to provide improved knowledge and e ...
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Who’s on First? How to Model Accountability |
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JohnWeathington
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
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A consistent pattern that emerges in compliance best practices, is the notion of accountability. Demonstrating accountability is a key component of building a solid compliance program. In this article, we explore the motivation, requirement, model, and architecture to make accountability a reality in your company.
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