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 Application Developers.”
A couple of treats for our history buffs:
1. T.O.A.D. from 1998
2. Oracle Magazine story from 1998
I think we can all agree that Toad has been around for quite awhile now. Well, those thousands, if not millions, of Toad fans started to get the attention of people in the SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, and other RDBMS neighborhoods. They started asking, “Hey, when can we get our very own version of Toad?”
This led to an experiment where Quest put out a free, little-publicized Toad that was all about SQL Server on its original user community. Wouldn’t you know it, it experienced several thousand downloads right away, proving that there was a real demand out there for excellent database tools for ALL database platforms. The experiment for SQL Server turned into a full-blown development project to put out a fully-functional Toad that was JUST for SQL Server.
Well it became fairly obvious very quickly that we couldn’t call this new offering “T.O.A.D. for SQL Server.” From that point on, the product family would be known as “Toad” and the individual products would have a descriptive byline to differentiate them.
We now offer full-blown Toad solutions for 4 of the major RDMBS vendors. And now our newest Toad allows you to connect to Access, Terradata, Sybase, and more!
Well, what makes Toad, Toad?
This is an excellent question indeed – and one that dozens of other companies and products have been trying to answer for a long time now. I believe that database professionals need and demand at least the following from their database development toolkits:
1. A Database Browser
Toad’s award winning Schema Browser revolutionized the Oracle environment. Exploring and managing the database is as easy and point-and-click. And if you like tree views, then it’s as easy and point-click-click-click-and click :)
I don’t know DB2, but I do know Toad so I don’t have to fumble around looking for the right commands or queries.
2. A Query Builder
Why do we use tools in the first place? To save time is probably in the top five. When you need to query the database, using a powerful graphical query builder is guaranteed to save you precious minutes of copy and pasting and flailing about looking for the right object and/or column EVERY TIME. Better yet, it shortens the learning curve of actually learning the RDBMS-specific SQL syntax required to answer your pressing business questions.
Quick, join 7 tables, query 15 columns and make no Typos! Oh, and I need it formatted!
3. A Powerful Editor
Whether you are writing application code, designing database migration scripts, or just doing Ad Hoc querying, a proper editor can make this a painless exercise. Code Snippets, Code Templates, 3rd party Source Code Control integration, SQL History Recall, object lookup helpers, and of course the Toad-original F4 object popup graphical DESCRIBE functionality all go into making Toad a VERY familiar place for a developer, even if they are not as comfortable with DB2 as they are with Oracle yet.
Manage multiple queries, multiple result-set grids, and transform your thoughts and imagination into real usable code quicker.
4. A Development and Management Team that LISTENS and DELIVERS
Many software products have their own user communities. Many even have their own discussion forums where users can get together to help solve each others problems. T.O.A.D. took this several steps forward by actually putting the people that make the product available on the front-line to listen to input. I have personally witnessed several times a user ask for a feature and have it validated and coded and into the current Beta for Toad within the same day for evaluation by the rest of the users. This commitment from Quest continues to evolve today and the future with the Toad Data Modeler, Toad for Data Analysis, and Toad for DB2, Toad for MySQL, and Toad for SQL Server products and their associated communities.
Have you been using Toad for more than 10 years? Have you leveraged your experience with Toad for Oracle into a faster deployment on a DB2 or SQL Server project?
If you can say yes to either of these questions, please share your experiences with our users on my blog today!