Recently, I received an email from the presales support team. They asked me to help them tune three SQL statements for a benchmark database provided by a customer. Our presales support said that our SQL Optimizer was not providing any alternatives for two of these three complex SQL statements. I found two of these SQL statements were very complicated and I knew that there should be a lot of alternative SQL generated. Finally,...

Many business analysts rely heavily upon Microsoft Excel as one of their primary tools for manipulating and reporting upon their business data. Sometimes they will send data extraction requests to their information systems (IS) people to perform and then deliver, sometimes they’ll instead access it themselves in place via the external data interface within Excel, and sometimes they’ll extract the data themselves from the Oracle...

Lately I’ve been seeing what I think might be an interesting yet disturbing new trend: whenever there’s a problem that initially seems unusual and/or unexplainable, it’s not uncommon to quickly question virtualization as a potential source of the issue. I fully understand that virtualization adds a new variable to the basic equation – and represents greater complexity due to more moving parts. But it seems to be somewhat rushed...

 

 

 

I have long been attracted to the idea and process of refactoring (explained below). It is now very exciting to see that automated refactoring features are working their way into tools for PL/SQL development. I will analyze these features over the next few entries in my ToadWorld blog, starting with SQL Developer and then moving on to PL/SQL Developer, and finishing up with SQL Navigator and Toad.

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Written by Rene Woody This blog is a continuation of a series about the SQL optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle. It covers how to specify the table join syntax to be used when generating SQL alternatives.

 

When the syntax for SQL statements was originally developed,...

For most users, the significant new feature for v9.7 will be the AppsDesigner. This technology allows a Toad user to take a collection of Toad commands or Actions and create a miniature Toad App or macro that you can then replay on demand or schedule to run when needed.  

Like most new features, you generally will learn how to use them when you are faced with a task that requires said feature. I’d like to share an...

A few weeks ago I wrote Part III of this series – and fortunately (or unfortunately for my poor ego) an astute reader wrote to ask for some clarification on my Excel chart. Ends up my Excel formula had a mistake – so many thanks to Johannes V. Djernæs from Miracle A/S in Denmark. So I’ll be...

Just a very brief blog this Thanksgiving week (my favorite holiday of the year) – part 2 of last week’s relatively easy suggestions on how to make Oracle run as fast as possible on minimal computer setup. As before, my goal is simply to squeeze as much performance blood from the Oracle turnip as possible when deployed on limited capacity equipment....

Written by Rene Woody

This blog is a continuation of a series about the SQL optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle. It covers optimizing SQL statements that use VIEWs.



In early versions of the Oracle database, a VIEW was handled like a temporary table that...

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.

Well, ‘overlook’ is such a critical, judgmental...

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 with various tasks. And...

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 apply the suggestions...

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, diagnostic and tuning screens or utilities. But not all...

Written by Rene Woody

This blog is a continuation of a series about the SQL optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle. It covers how to generate more SQL alternatives.



When you optimize a simple SQL statement,...

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.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Cary Millsap’s “Method-R” technique for Optimizing Oracle Performance via detailed analysis of all of the business process wait states. It is fundamentally sound since it’s based on genuine business concerns...

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 European) or EE8 (Eastern European) character sets and as they are not a strict subset of Unicode the ALTER Database does not work. So the only chance is to export the whole database, create a new one (with UTF8 or similar) and import it again.

...

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 given to Alex De Vergori of Betfair.  Oracle Magazine writes:

...

A few weeks ago 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 that taking the time to properly layer your virtual infrastructure settings can have substantial impacts – which are only...

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: Set and Mastermind.

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Written by Rene Woody

This blog is a continuation of a series (view last blog on the Optimization Process) about the SQL optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle. It covers how to limit the number...

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.

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 that taking the time to properly layer your virtual infrastructure settings can have substantial impacts – which are only magnified...

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 code completion support...

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.

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 with a few...

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 4.1 and versions before that to reduce startup time if you are annoyed by it.

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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.

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 some plugins might want to read it later on unbeknown to the original startup code. All parameters are specified using this format.

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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 Toad for DB2...

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.

I'm one of the original developers...

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 Mastermind.

 

Play either (preferably both) of these games, and you will write better software.

...

Many people swore that database on a virtual machine would not fly – or at best, would be accepted very, very slowly. I was not one of those people – so I wrote a new book on just that subject: Oracle on VMware: Expert tips for Database Virtualization. However I don’t expect people in these tough economic times to just go out and buy every...

Written by Rene Woody This blog is the beginning of a series that will cover the optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle.

When writing a SQL statement, it is easy to be satisfied when you have figured out how to get the correct results. This is especially true when you are writing a complicated...

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 and precise (and maybe just a little bit overwhelming. He needed twice the time allotted) on this most important topic.

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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 queries in the editor. The technology is...

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.

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 that would give someone serious reason to upgrade...

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.

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 between FIRST and LAST that is not defined). And if your collection is empty, the loop will not execute at all, whereas with a for loop, an empty collection could cause a VALUE_ERROR exception if you are not careful....

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 button. All you have to do is browse to the working folder, select your file...

Toad for Data Analysis now comes included with Toad for Oracle!

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.

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 draw a simple diagram of...

On this 7th anniversary of the September 11th catastrophe, we’ll take a close look at how to characterize disaster, and more importantly how to learn and move on.

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 stuff, too J.  

But, not any longer.  Today we launched a new search...

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...

The editor window is probably where most users spend a majority of their time. In this blog, I’ll continue a conversation we had a few weeks ago.  Please note that all of these features are available in the standard edition of Toad for Oracle, version 9.6.

 

6.     Editor Options

  Toad has many options...

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 SQL Optimizer that was made to this code block. I got this code from a developer, so I know there are other methods...

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.