Last month, Jeff Smith wrote an excellent blog about Toad’s new Stats Pack capabilities.  And as Jeff pointed out, Stats Pack is an older – but free technology. While Oracle’s AWR and ADDM reports are clearly the next generation of performance diagnostics tools – and arguably preferable, you must purchase the OEM Tuning and Diagnostics packs to utilize these facilities. So even though DBA’s can access AWR and ADDM reports either through PL/SQL calls or the Toad DBA GUI – which simplifies access further, many people who use AWR and ADDM may not be properly licensed. Thus Stats Pack may well remain relevant for some time into the future due to its cost.

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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 facilitate the evolution and revolution of Toad The first group, groups.yahoo.com/group/toad, provides a useful and...

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 there are simple steps to keeping Toad humming...

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.

So the Toad Data Modeler 3.0 logical diagram shown below relates that Entity1 always has the parent attributes of E1_Attribute1-4,...

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 more about how “uninformed” installation of the latest Oracle release on a notebook could lead to negative surprises. 

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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) while anywhere within the displayed data grid and choose the “save as” option as shown below, but what if you could make that save operation run 10X...

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.

1.      PQO make sense universally on any SMP or multi-processer database server 

Not really....

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 commercial or freeware on that PC against your local or remote Oracle database. But shoot, Toad is a Windows only program – so what’s a body to do?

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1. I’m using a tool like Quest’s Benchmark Factory®, so that’s all I need.



Wrong. I highly recommend that anyone doing benchmarking read the specs for whatever industry standard tests they are going to perform. Because software to automate these tests will ask questions or present options that you cannot really define unless you understand their context – which is defined in the spec.



For example,...

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 Toad doing that’s wrong (i.e. a bug)?

The short answer is that this is an Oracle 10g DBA best practices...

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® offers a feature for doing just that – the Data Subset Wizard, found under main menu Database-> Export->Data Subset Wizard.



There are two common scenarios where...

Last week, Jeff Smith’s blog on the FTP utility in Toad® was very good. He even says at the end that “If you like Toad’s FTP, then I recommend you check out the REXEC and TELNET features as well.” That made me think – it probably would be nice just to see a list of all the UNIX and Linux capabilities within Toad in one article....

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:

Easier to segregate and read (without mixing up join versus restriction code) Easier to construct join code correctly (especially in the case of “outer” joins) Portable syntax will work on all other ANSI compliant...

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, but they are fully maintained during DML such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE.

Let’s...

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 nonetheless works well in many situations. With Oracle continuing to improve upon them – partitioning is now a powerful asset in any DBA’s tool belt. So let’s examine some of the new table partitioning techniques introduced with Oracle 11g....

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. 

When designing a relational database, analysts often look at prior systems’ screens and reports for insight. So the database analyst designing the business entity of a “product” might see...

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.

Traditional Methods To begin, let’s review how DBAs have historically allocated disk space to Oracle – so that we have a baseline to compare against, and thus see how much simpler ASM makes the overall picture, which generally translates to easier setup and management. Figure 1 shows the traditional options.

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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.

CPU

Architecture

CPU

Family

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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 “Maximize Database Performance via Toad”, in hindsight it...

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 real-world database workloads, nor does it properly stress the capabilities of today’s hardware and database engines. As such, the TPC-C is quickly loosing favor!

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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 the horizon of pain. I’ve even witnessed people who will remain on an unsupported tool by a defunct vendor rather...

You’ll have to forgive me for spoofing the famous movie line “We don’t need no stinking badges” (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948 and Blazing Saddles, 1974), it just seemed quite apropos J



I was discussing data modeling needs recently with a potential customer – and like many shops I visit, they saw no need for data modeling. They believed that their DBAs, data administrators and application architects knew...

In this installment I thought I'd write about the exciting, and soon to debut, Toad Data Modeler 3.0 release rather than yet another boring academic or technical topic on data modeling. TDM 3.0 is quite exciting. While it has not yet been made available for public beta – it will be very soon (so please email the product manager John.Pocknell@Quest.com to get signed up). And once...

Over the decades I’ve worked with many data modelers – and I’ve learned something key to building a great model that is not always intuitively obvious: spend at least 50% of your data modeling time on the relationships. Often modelers are so overly concerned with the entities, attributes and unique identifiers or keys they don’t allocate enough time for the proper questioning, construction and review of relationships. Therefore,...

Probably one of the most often discussed and hotly debated topics in both data modeling and database design is that of normalization. Many database designers, architects, DBAs and senior developers have differing positions and/or beliefs on the topic. However quite unfortunately, they often are not communicating with optimal effectiveness due to some fundamental differences in terminology and understanding. The simple solution...

Last month I wrote about “Why Reverse Engineering is Always Worthwhile.” So the logical next issue to examine is forward engineering – its different approaches and its many comparative benefits. The best way to do this is via an analogical example J

I live in Dallas-Fort Worth. Let’s assume that I drove down to Austin at the start of the this year’s college football season to watch my #1 Ohio State Buckeyes play against...

In many shops that I visit, neither the DBA’s nor the database developers place much value on performing data modeling. Often there are seemingly sound reasons for this exclusion: the historically high price of data modeling tools, data models are not required as a project milestone or deliverable, and quite often the database was simply either inherited or supports a third party application – and thus is not open for modification....