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Toad and Database Commentaries

Toad World blogs are a mix of insightful how-tos from Quest experts as well as their commentary on experiences with new database technologies.  Have some views of your own to share?  Post your comments!  Note:  Comments are restricted to registered Toad World users.

Do you have a topic that you'd like discussed?  We'd love to hear from you.  Send us your idea for a blog topic.

Most recent blog entries
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Super & Sub Type Option #1
Bert Friday, November 30, 2007 3:50 PM

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!
JeffSmith 11/29/2007
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
StevenFeuersteinTW Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:24 PM

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
JimWankowski Wednesday, November 21, 2007 8:24 PM

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…
JeffSmith 11/20/2007
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
Bert Friday, November 16, 2007 10:41 AM
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
StevenFeuersteinTW Sunday, November 11, 2007 11:13 AM
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
Bert Tuesday, November 06, 2007 8:14 AM

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
Bert Wednesday, October 31, 2007 6:46 AM
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
JimWankowski Monday, October 29, 2007 2:27 PM
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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Tuning – Detection, Diagnosis, and Prevention
JeffSmith 10/26/2007
If you frequent Toad® World, then you are probably aware of the fact that Quest has a technology that offers to
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Running Toad on Linux!
Bert Monday, October 22, 2007 4:09 AM
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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An Exercise in Refactoring: Are two files equal?
StevenFeuersteinTW Thursday, October 18, 2007 8:50 AM

All files referenced in document available from: www.oracleplsqlprogramming. ...

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A Sneak Peak
JeffSmith 10/15/2007
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
JimWankowski Friday, October 12, 2007 11:13 AM

Hey DB2’ers,

I had a busy week last week speaking at the Central Canadian DB2 Users Group in Toronto

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Top Ten Benchmarking Misconceptions
Bert Wednesday, October 10, 2007 10:26 PM

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

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Simplifying Database Administration – Part 1
JohnPocknell Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Problem Resolution

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What about a Self-learning SQL Optimizer?
RichardTo Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:45 AM

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???
JeffSmith 10/3/2007

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?
Bert Tuesday, October 02, 2007 9:44 AM
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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It’s A Dirty Job – But Someone’s Got To Do It !
JohnPocknell Monday, October 01, 2007
There’s no doubt about it - being a DBA is not easy.

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Roll with the Changes
JimWankowski Friday, September 28, 2007 3:16 PM
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
MikeA Friday, September 28, 2007 3:13 PM
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
JeffSmith 9/27/2007
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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Don't start with a blank slate!
StevenFeuersteinTW Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:23 AM
Use templates to accelerate high quality coding.

When you open a new edit window in Toad, it looks like this:

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Toad Subsets Data
Bert Monday, September 24, 2007 7:43 AM

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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Quseful #8: Execute DDL statements from a file
StevenFeuersteinTW Thursday, September 20, 2007 10:37 AM

What's the point?
This utility will make it easy for you to read in the contents of DDL statements (like CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE) and execute them within Oracle.

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The Attack of the Clones!
JimWankowski Monday, September 17, 2007 11:28 AM
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?
StevenFeuersteinTW Friday, September 14, 2007 11:08 AM
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
RichardTo Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:51 PM
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
JeffSmith 9/10/2007
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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Toad does UNIX and Linux
Bert Monday, September 10, 2007 4:39 AM

Last week, Jeff Smith’s blog on the FTP utility in Toad

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Messing With 11g 32bit RAC
MikeA Wednesday, September 05, 2007 10:25 AM

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
Bert Tuesday, September 04, 2007 4:06 AM

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:

  • &l ...
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FT-Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Or, FTP with Toad
JeffSmith 8/31/2007

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
JimWankowski Thursday, August 30, 2007 1:26 PM

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!
StevenFeuersteinTW Wednesday, August 29, 2007 12:42 PM

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
Bert Monday, August 27, 2007 6:09 AM
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
JeffSmith 8/24/2007

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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Undocumented But Supported Feature In Oracle11g: Reference Fields Of Records In A FORALL Statement!
StevenFeuersteinTW Wednesday, August 22, 2007 7:41 AM

Kudos to Alex Nuijten for bringing this gem to light, he wrote in his latest AMIS blog entry that:

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Oracle 11g Improves Partitioning
Bert Tuesday, August 21, 2007 4:21 AM
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
StevenFeuersteinTW Friday, August 17, 2007 9:27 AM
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
JimWankowski Wednesday, August 15, 2007 10:41 AM
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
Bert Wednesday, August 15, 2007 6:18 AM

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
RichardTo Tuesday, August 14, 2007 10:28 AM
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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Finessing Filters and other Fun Features - Part Two
JeffSmith 8/10/2007
In my last blog I attempted to cover all of the cool filters in Toad in a single posting.  How silly of me! 
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What is Oracle ASM and does Toad for Oracle support it?
Bert Wednesday, August 08, 2007 5:35 AM

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?
StevenFeuersteinTW Monday, August 06, 2007 2:01 PM
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”
Bert Thursday, August 02, 2007 6:55 PM

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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Finessing Filters and other Fun Features - Part One
JeffSmith 8/1/2007
Having the world’s information at our fingertips via databases is an extremely powerful resource.  It can also be quite daunting. Any Oracle user who has had to manage an
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