A full preview is in the works, but sometimes a new feature is so compelling you just want to start telling strangers on the street about it right away. Rather than make you wait till tomorrow to hear all about Apple’s new tablet device, here’s some juicy Toad gossip right now!

 

DESCribe

Perhaps one of the most productivity-enhancing features in Toad, the DESC (F4) command allows the user to get access...

In this post I'll show how to produce an exception report using the row count variable and if..condition automation activity.

Scripting repetitive tasks can ease your work load. Here's how to do it in TDA.

A simple, step by step guide for creating TOAD Report Manager reports and templates (TRD -TOAD Report Definition format).

Written by Finn Ellebaek Nielsen. A short introduction to Continuous Integration (CI) and a description of how to integrate testing Oracle code with QCTO in a CI environment.

Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) is a single database that is shared by multiple Oracle instances. It provides opportunities for improved database availability, performance and scalability. Oracle RAC lowers the TCO of a high-end database and IT assets, since a complex Oracle database can be set-up on low-cost, standard, modular parts. Oracle RAC has matured into a true enterprise, scalable solution, but the adoption curve and skill-set required to maintain RAC is relatively slow, as most organizations who have installed RAC only use it as a two-node cluster.

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Using indexes can improve the performance of applications using the database. This is well known to many, many people. However, the application of too many indexes can have the reverse effect. There’s a balance that must be struck and you may find yourself needing to locate indexes that aren’t being used. If you’re already using the Quest SQL Optimizer for DB2 LUW, you can take advantage of the Index Usage Analyzer to help...

This blog will give you the necessary steps to migrate your MySQL BMF repository to another database of your choice. The following databases are supported by BMF: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Sybase. We will be using the Data Migration Wizard that is provided to us by BMF.

The first step is to decide which database platform you would like to do the migration for. Once that is decided, we can begin.



Go...

An exhaustive look at Toad, that doesn’t take that long to read and see immediate improvement in your day-to-day use of the tool. If you are new to Toad, this will shorten the learning curve. If you have been using Toad for 10 years, this will ensure you are not overlooking features or workflows that have snuck in while you weren’t looking.

One of the most common TOAD questions or problem areas is with connecting to remote and/or local databases. The process and requirements are actually quite simple – yet this remains a high frequency question that seems to cause remarkable confusion. And not just for new Oracle or new TOAD users, as sometimes even old pros can forget and ask. They just often do a Homer Simpson “Doh”...

Sometimes you need to reference the value of an IN argument (an input, in Code Tester terminology) in your outcome. For example, under certain circumstances, the string returned by your function should be the same as the input value. Or perhaps the out value should be some part of the input value.

You could hard-code the same value you supplied in the Input Grid, but then if you change the input value, you have to...

For those of you who haven’t yet upgraded to Toad 10, or were perhaps waiting until the first minor release, here’s a quick synopsis of what really characterizes Toad 10.

 

Toad for Oracle v10 offers new features and many enhancements to existing features, all of it designed to augment your workflow and to enable you to get your job done more productively, more accurately and with better visibility of the environment...

Did you know that you can call Spotlight on DB2 LUW from Toad for DB2 LUW and vice versa? Well, ok maybe you did. If that’s the case, please move along, there’s nothing to see here. Still with me? Then read on!

Toad for DB2 LUW and Spotlight on DB2 LUW exist as separate executables on your workstation. You might now be thinking “no kidding, Ben.” That’s fine. After all, I have been called the Master of the Obvious. However,...

We all love TOAD – both the commercial and freeware versions. We love it because it’s simply the best Oracle productivity enhancing tool out there. A few weeks back, I mentioned the many other freeware offerings from Quest. So this week I thought I’d mention a few other freeware offerings that serve me nearly as much as TOAD – just in different functional areas. Here are my top five.

Step by step instructions for importing and exporting TOAD Report Manager reports (TRD -TOAD Report Definition format).

Toad for Oracle is a world-class enterprise query-develop-tune-administration tool for the Oracle database platform. This document attempts to differentiate Toad from the average Oracle IDE or query tool so that the reader can make an informed decision to invest in the Toad product family.

Following is a list of features and concepts that most commercial and even freeware offerings strive to deliver. Each feature will demonstrate clearly how Toad rises above the competition. If you can live with only the lowest-common-denominator features, then Toad may not be an easy sell. If, however, you need a tool to rescue from hairy situations, tune your systems, and automate those painful daily tasks, then Toad should be a clear winner.

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Many TOAD users ask “How can I run my SQL script against a collection or even all my databases all at once (i.e. in a single step)?” The problem is they generally ask this question while in the Editor – which by definition works with but a single active database connection at a time. But if you simply save the editor contents to a SQL script file – you can then use the TOAD Script Manager to execute that script against any...

Often database professionals need good freeware tools to get their job done. Sometimes it’s because there’s no funding for software. And in some cases a tool is needed to replace the purchased tool that ends up not being able to do the job. Finally in today’s world of open source, some people just hate to pay for tools – even if there is budget and/or the job clearly could benefit from commercial quality tools.

For...

FORALL was introduced into PL/SQL in Version 8i. It is a fantastic feature; you should use it in place of all loops that contain DML statements performing row-by-row processing. You will generally see performance improvements of at least an order of magnitude. 

If you are not familiar with FORALL, make it a priority to get familiar. You can start with my brand new 5th edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming,...

Quest Software has two of the most powerful tools for PL/SQL development: Toad for Oracle and SQL Navigator for Oracle. Personally, I spend more time working with Toad for Oracle and I truly enjoy the solution. Before I proceed any further, I want to clarify a point. I am not advocating one solution over the other for PL/SQL development. That’s a conversation I refuse to have, because it borders on arguing which religion is...

We are pleased to provide two new command-line utilities that were developed for the next version of JProbe. The first can be used standalone to obtain basic memory usage reports from JVM memory dumps. The second can be used for controlling a JProbe Analysis Engine in a headless environment or for scripting JProbe actions.

This blog is the fifth in a series about misconceptions surrounding SQL tuning that are quite common.

 

Around 15 years ago, when I was a DBA both for Oracle and Sybase, a lot of SQL came from my colleagues which I needed to tune.  Initially, I enjoyed the satisfaction of tuning a SQL statement that ran in a few minutes down to a...

I recently published the following puzzle in the ToadWorld newsletter:

Which of the following queries return the names of programs (without duplication) defined in the currently connected schema whose source contains a call to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (assume that this program name does not appear inside comments)?

A.   SELECT name FROM USER_DEPENDENCIES     WHERE referenced_name = 'DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE' B.  ...

It’s been a while since I wrote my data warehousing book, so I wanted to read something hip and new on the topic. Lucky for me someone suggested that I examine “Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started”...

Quick, what’s the number one complaint about Toad for Oracle?

“The User Interface is waaaaaaaaay too complicated!”



Out of the box, Toad’s setup to pretty much have everything enabled. If we hid stuff, there’s a good chance users would assume the functionality just wasn’t there to be taken advantage of.  And, as John so elegantly put it in his latest whitepaper on QuestDotCom,...

Many people these days have to work on both traditional “online transactional processing” (i.e. OLTP) systems as well as data warehouses. But just what is a data warehouse? Generally speaking a data warehouse is nothing more than a specialized business reporting system used by mid to senior level management to research and develop a tactical plan and/or true long term strategy. Thus in many cases while these systems may be considered mission critical, they are not really true 24 X 7 systems. Often data warehouses are utilized during normal to extended business hours, with some batch activities for data loading and aggregation/summary calculations.

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Did you know that in Code Tester 1.8.5 you can now perform in-line validation of your customization code? For more complex tests, this will save you lots of time and make it easier to build your regression tests.

 

The ultimate objective of Code Tester is easy to state: allow developers to test arbitrarily complex PL/SQL programs without writing any test code....

I want to start by thanking everyone who participated in the free TOAD book contest by submitting new feature ideas or enhancement requests. I received numerous good ideas. I also received about a third that were already in TOAD – and have been for a long time.  I actually can benefit from those emails too, since Quest can probably better expose and/or offer training on those issues. Remember too this was an entirely subjective...

I was recently in Germany, and did an interview with Erik Franz of database|pro. One of the questions he asked me was: "Which programming language would you recommend a college student learn to give them the strongest chance at a good job upon graduation?" I would have loved to be able to answer: "Learn PL/SQL!

Oracle introduced support for XML in the relational database going back at least to about the 8i release. Toad for Oracle introduced formal support for XML in the 8.0 release.

XML and Toad v8.0 – v9.7



As you browse or query an object, if it contains an XML

...

So with Toad v10 being released, my Tips & Tricks guide became a bit out of date.  You can find an updated copy, as well as our v9 copy, here.  All of your favorite keyboard shortcuts and workflows remain largely unchanged, so this is more of an update for making sure screenshots and naming conventions are correct...

 In one of my previous lives, I worked at a startup company testing software. Our application used Oracle as the back-end and the nature of my role had me working closely with our Oracle DBA. As part of our processes, our DBA had to build documentation describing the schemas our application needed. The reports included things like table names, column names and their data types, indexes, etc. This used to take him hours until...

As I write this, I am flying back to Chicago now, 9 PM Oct 21, from Mexico City, after a very nice two day visit.

 

Quest Mexico asked me to come down to help celebrate the release of Toad Version 10. I said "OK."

 

And, wow, they did a really fantastic job of making me feel appreciated. Besides...

When designing and constructing a successful (i.e. effective and efficient) relational database, there are two fundamental sets of rules or design principles that are universally accepted and generally practiced by database architects.

Steven discusses how LTRIM works and an alternative solution for a user's problem.

TOAD offers three distinct ways to connect to your database, as shown by the three tabs circled below on the connection screen. In this week’s blog we’ll examine the differences between the first two: TNS and Direct. No matter which of the three methods you choose, TOAD requires the Oracle “SQL*Net” client to be on your PC. TOAD needs to talk over the network to your database, and that requires certain Oracle network DLL files...

A little known, but very handy feature of PL/SQL is the ability to apply set operators, like union, intersect and minus, to nested tables.

In case you missed my announcement on the Code Tester community forum, we have now posted a beta version of 1.9.

 

The major focus for 1.9 to date has been to add support for automated testing of object type methods. This beta release offers the first glimpse of this functionality; you should now be able to define tests for constructors, static methods, and member procedures and functions.

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Written by Steven Feuerstein   Code Tester is a relatively young tool (first released for production use in February 2007), but it has matured quickly (hey, at least I think so!) and is packed full of handy features.

 

As with all other tools, however, it can sometimes be hard to find the "jewels," so I thought I would highlight a couple.

 

1. Dynamically generated test cases

 

Rather...

Undocumented functionality in TDA, Toad for SqlServer, Toad for DB2 and Toad for MySQL to use advanced flow control when executing scripts.

The very latest generation of Toad for Oracle is about to hit the streets (early October) so we thought we’d give you a quick preview now so you’ll be up to speed when it’s released. This blog is part 2 and covers more of the new features and updates.

JProbe's new JDBC component nodes help link Java and SQL performance analysis together, to identify the root causes of performance issues in your applications, and to help you resolve those issues.

As DBAs it seems that we are always faced with issues of Database Performance. As gate keepers to our multiple database environments many of our Service Level Agreements (SLA's) can be directly tied into the health of our databases. Working with Quest's Toad solution we can now take a comprehensive look at the health of our databases with the DB Health Check.  Note: This Toad feature is only available in the commercial version...

Version 7.5 of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle will be released in October. The major effort for this new release was in the optimizer engine and the new UI for the optimization, index generation and execution functions. The following is a screen shot of the new UI. It looks tidy and easier to use compared to the old version. All the statistics names now use the Oracle standard naming, so, users can easy understand each statistics...

With General Availability of JProbe 8.2, here is a preview of some of the changes and improvements that you will find in this new release:

The JProbe 8.1 release focused on improvements to JProbe Memory analysis. The JProbe 8.2 release focuses on improvements to JProbe Performance analysis.

Users asked us for the ability to track the runtime execution status of threads. JProbe 8.2 introduces a new Threads sub-tab...

Last week’s blog was part 2 of a 3 part series about techniques for optimizing a notebook PC for running Oracle database within a virtual machine. In part 1 I detailed my “top ten” ideas for proper host (i.e. notebook) configuration. In part 2,...

Sometimes, I’m asked to help a customer work through a particular challenge they’re facing when using one of Quest’s solutions. Many times, the meetings are one-on-one sessions with the customer where we take turns sharing our desktops to better understand the problems being faced and how the solution might be able to address the problems. I actually enjoy the one-on-one sessions, because it gives me deeper insight into how our customers are using our solutions. Plus, it’s a great way to meet and connect with people, which is the part of my job I enjoy the most. Yes, at times, I’ve been called ‘weird’.

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The very latest generation of Toad for Oracle is about to hit the streets (early October) so we thought we’d give you a quick preview now so you’ll be up to speed when it’s released.

Last week’s blog was part 1 of a 3 part series about techniques for optimizing a notebook PC for running Oracle database within a virtual machine. In part 1 I detailed my “top ten” ideas for proper host (i.e. notebook) configuration. This week I’ll offer a comparable...

Written by Jeff Smith, Quest Solutions Architect

Toad is a brand at Quest. We have several tools that have been built explicitly for developers and administrators in the Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and MySQL universe. After gaining the following of about 2 million users over the past decade we realized that more than a third of our users did not fall into the ‘developer’...