Every month, a Toad World newsletter goes out to thousands of Toad users and it includes a monthly puzzle that I write. Last month's puzzle went like this:

Which of the following blocks does not contain an infinite loop?

In case you simply can't get enough of Steven Feuerstein (no, I don't generally talk about my self in the third person or in the royal "we"), I invite you to check out this interview. I had an awful lot of fun answering the questions, and you might be entertained reading them.

Written by Rene Woody

This blog is the first of a series about test running the SQL statements in the Tuning Lab in Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle to find the best performing SQL statement in your database environment. It covers the options for terminating the SQL alternatives when they are executed in a batch.

It's truly one of the oddities of the PL/SQL language that it does not offer a delimited string parsing program. The closest we can get is DBMS_UTILITY.COMMA_TO_TABLE, and that is sadly deficient (it only parses comma-delimited strings and each item between the commas must be a valid PL/SQL identifier).

 

So I built one myself (the parse package) and put ...

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.  ...

Recently there have been a lot of questions on some of the features of Toad Data Modeler which are part of the basic components of the tool but for whatever reason people seem to have a bit of trouble figuring them out.

In the past I have published some papers on a couple of these features on Toad World and I will provide links to them at the bottom of this blog.

This was a question I got this morning from a customer. I showed them how to do this with the ‘Alter’ dialog in Toad’s Schema Browser. However, they wanted to do it for more than one table at a time, and apparently some OTHER tool could do so. Why couldn’t Toad?

Great question. It turns out that IT CAN INDEED do so. Here’s how:

Developers are hard people to satisfy. Oracle gives us this incredibly robust, powerful and easy to use database programming language – and all we can do is complain about what it doesn't do for us.

Well, that's reality for you: PL/SQL is powerful and robust and easy to use, but also very narrowly focused. So if you want it to do something outside of its area ...

I think we can all agree that of ALL the features in Toad that impact the most number of users is the data grid. Whether investigating the contents of a table, running queries, or monitoring connected sessions in the Session Browser, the data grids deliver information to the user. How well you know the data grid and all of its embedded features will impact how useful and productive ...

I had a very productive visit with an information management company, demonstrating the complete range of Toad solutions, including the Toad Development and DBA Suite for Oracle, Toad for SQL Server, as well as Toad for Data Analysts. The presentation took place in Boston, and dialed in through a webcast were attendees in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Belfast, and Bangalore. This vis ...

While co-presenting with Bert at the Rocky Mountain Oracle User group, Bert yells out “Hey, show that cool FK lookup thingie in the data grids.” I was like, ‘huh?’ Surely Bert just didn’t call me out in front of 100 or so people on a Toad feature that I did not fully understand?

Well, I got around to figuring out just what Bert was talking about, and NOW I rememb ...

I am an SC for Quest Software, and very fortunate to be able to demonstrate the solutions that make up the Toad product family. My initial goals for this blog will be to share some of the interesting conversations and discussions that arise from Toad demonstrations. Rather than screen shots of a certain feature, I will try and relate Toad functionality to real life scenarios and exa ...

A lot of times people will ask the Toad Yahoo discussion group or live at Toad Tips & Tricks events whether Toad can do something. Specifically, the question might be more like can Toad version X support this very cool new Oracle feature I’d like to leverage.

 

For example, a user might ask does Toad 8.0 offer a screen for Oracle AWR. If you look ...

In the previous blog, we compared and contrasted how database Performance Management operations are performed in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager (OEM) and Quest’s Toad DBA Suite for Oracle and how Toad is ...

This blog is the first in a series about misconceptions surrounding SQL tuning that are quite common. The first one covers the misconception that you can use the estimated cost from the database SQL optimizer to accurately judge the performance of a SQL statement in comparison to its rewrites.

 

SQL tuning is a very interesting topic and most DBA or devel ...

Welcome to my first blog! I am very excited about this opportunity to relay information about benchmarking/performance testing and, in particular, Benchmark Factory for Databases (BMF), but where to begin? For my first blog, I’ll start on the topic of latency.

One key thing to understand when doing testing is the characteristics of the workload, and a big piece o ...

In part 1 of this series, I reviewed the automated refactoring features in SQL Developer. In part 2, I checked out PL/SQL Developer's refactoring features. Now, it's time for Toad.

&am ...

By Johannes Ahrends and John Pocknell

In the previous blog, we compared and contrasted how Database Maintenance operations are performed in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager (OEM) and Quest’s Toad DBA Suite for Oracle and how Toad is an excel ...

The joint IOUG and OAUG Collaborate 2009 conference is a just over two months away. Not only is Collaborate a premier event for Oracle database technology and applications technical sessions, it’s a good format for hobnobbing with fellow database professionals.

 

This year’s event is being held Sunday, May 3^rd, through Thursday, May ...

I recently got an email from a user, and after I replied figured that it might be helpful for others to see as well.

 

Like most things in life, there are prerequisites and preparations for Oracle databases.  Regardless of version, this is especially true for application access and usage. Oracle is a highly scalable and configurable database, therefore DBAs must configure their database for how it will be used to guarantee meeting their users’ expectations – including database developers. Failure to do so can lead to p ...

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 sheds some insight o ...

In a previous blog http://www.toadworld.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/67/EntryID/324/Default.aspx I discussed a real life example of “How to use Quest SQL Optimizer to tune complex SQL”. I spent two days installing the database and another two day ...

The Oracle 11g database is nothing short of a modern technical marvel. From the features it offers to the many platforms it runs upon – it’s amazing how far they’ve come. But as a “true enterprise” database, Oracle 11g requires some DBA oversight to be applied when creating databases. Although Oracle supplies a very simple and yet fully capable database creation ...

By Johannes Ahrends and John Pocknell

This 3-part blog will help you differentiate between what Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) offers the DBA compared to Toad DBA Suite for Oracle and how the same tasks are approached using each.

 

Toad DBA Suite for Oracle provides a complete solutio ...

We don’t get this particular question per se as often as one would expect, but we do see enough user problems where this fundamental issue becomes the underlying question to answer for problem resolution. Below is a chart for the release dates for both Toad and Oracle. The “blue highlighted” dates are when Oracle first releases a major new version, such as Oracle 10g in January of 2004. But it’s the “red highli ...

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 the importance of finding t ...

Is German your native language?  Read this blog in German on Johannes' tech articles page.

A lot of companies with Oracle databases have been using RMAN as their main backup utility for years now. But others are ...

I’ve got Toad Freeware installed and running on my Ubuntu 8.10 Linux machine – and so far, not a single problem has yet occurred (knock on wood).

 

Here are the basic steps that I had to perform in order to “

In part 1 of this series, I reviewed the automated refactoring features in SQL Developer. Now I will check out PL/SQL Developer (version 7.1.5)'s refactoring features.

 

To access these features, I highlight some code in a procedure edit window and then ...

Happy new year everybody. I hope everyone had a great holiday season. It’s tough getting your head back in the game after a long holiday, that’s for sure! But there is a lot to look forward to in 2009 with our DB2 products. Toad for DB2 came a long way in 2008. As y ...

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 exp ...

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 ...

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 b ...

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 Develop ...

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 jo ...

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 ...

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 statemen ...

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.