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.

 

Toad for Oracle v10 will have some 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 in which you work - whether you are a developer working in an unfamiliar database or a DBA trying to manage multiple databases.

 

Toad 10.0 is the beginning of a new generation of Toad releases which will offer significant improvements in productivity to developers, DBAs and analysts moving forward.

 

The following four statements characterize what this 10.0 release and subsequent releases will offer:

 

In order to minimize coding and other errors usually associated with an incomplete understanding of the database environment, developers and DBAs need a simple way to visualize the database schema and the Toad ER Diagram window serves that purpose very well. The new ERD for Toad 10 provides far more capabilities than its predecessor; particularly when it comes to graphical manipulation and reporting.

 

 

There are a number of ways to include or add schema objects into the ER Diagram:

Zoom, Pan, Loupe and Fit-to-View are all available for maximum flexibility when working with large schemas. In addition, a grid can be displayed with objects being snapped-to-grid or objects aligned to each other to enable excellent close-up work as well. There is also an Autolayout button.

 

The properties of objects can displayed directly in the diagram using F4 and you can even right-click an object and view the Schema Browser right-click menu on-the-fly if you need to perform a task (such as Alter Table).

 

Notes and a Title block can be added for additional documentation and there is even a Category feature which allows different groups of objects to be colored a unique color.

 

For printing purposes, multiple formats are supported up to A3 size and there is a fit-to-page feature.

 

Workspaces allow specific parts of a complex schema layout to be drawn separately, where that may be convenient, but the connections to the main diagram remain. Categories can be created which allow different schema sub-groups to be color-coded.

 

Diagrams can be exported into bmp, png and jpeg format and reports can be generated in HTML or RTF format. The HTML diagram is hyperlinked allowing you to view object details simply by clicking on the object in the diagram. Reports can be automatically zipped and added as an email attachment by opening your Windows Outlook client.

 

 

 

As always, if you also have a copy of Toad Data Modeler, you can reverse-engineer schema objects in the Toad ER Diagram to create a complete physical data model in TDM.

 

You can also create data for tables viewed in the diagram (Professional Edition and above).

 

You probably have routine tasks you often have to perform every day or every week and you probably wish there was some way you could automate them so here’s a couple of things we think you will like.

 

The first one is aimed more for DBAs, but developers could use it too and that is Script Manager. DBAs sometimes have to run a bunch of scripts against a number of their managed databases, but they can only run them one at a time and then they have to repeat the process for each database. How about if you could select ALL your scripts and run them simultaneously against ALL your databases?

 

Script Manager itself is not a new feature for Toad 10, but the ability to select a group of database connections against which you need to run a group of scripts is.

 

Here’s what the new Script Manager window looks like.

 

 

The “Connections to use” panel is new. It will be pre-populated with any currently active connections, but you can also use the Add button to select additional ones from the main Connections window.

 

You then highlight the scripts you wish to execute (the same way you did before) and click the execute button. This lets you execute scripts in this window, the Editor or the Quest ScriptRunner tool. The outputs from each script run will appear in a tabbed region in the Output tab reading from left to right. See below.

 

 

There is also an options button which lets you select the Editor as the default. A separate Editor window will open for each connection.

 

Also notice the “On File Menu” column in the lower data grid in the previous and following screen shots. Whatever scripts you check here will appear in the following three places in Toad:

 

The Script Manager button (down arrow):

 

 

Project Manager (via the connections tab):

 

 

 

Database Browser (right click a database instance): This part is new for Toad 10.

 

 

This gives you the flexibility to run one of more regularly executed scripts on-the-fly (without having to open the Script Manager window) from multiple places where it is most logical to do so.

 

The Database Browser launch point is perhaps the most likely since DBAs can use it to view all their servers and databases in one single screen.

 

Another type of multi-task execution which is now available in Toad 10 is an extension to our current AppDesigner feature (called Automation Designer in Toad 10).

 

Automation Designer allows you to save tasks you would normally perform interactively in Toad, from saving data to a file, comparing 2 schemas to running a database health check and simply selecting them, when the time comes, and executing them on-the-fly. For more information on this feature, please refer to this article published on Toad World.

 

In Toad 10, you now have the capability to executed these tasks (or what we call Actions) or groups of tasks saved as a sequential workflow (or what we call Action Sets) against multiple database connections simultaneously.

 

 

Here, you can see an Action Set in the right panel with a selection of tasks which can be executed sequentially, such as Export DDL, Schema reports, script execution, etc.

If I right-click an App (Action Set), I can select which database connections I want to run these tasks against. The Connections window opens and I can multi-select which ones to use. I can even call Toad from the command line and execute Action Sets remotely or programmatically.

With Script Manager and Automation Designer, you should expect to be able to save a huge amount of time performing routine tasks leaving more time to focus on more pressing matters.
 

Our Toad users are always looking to see what else they can do in Toad in order to use more of it. Since Quest Software introduced Toad World some years ago, providing users with the latest educational and training materials, including: videos, tech briefs, white papers, expert blogs, and tech tips from Toad-family product experts and is now hugely popular, we thought it would be a good idea to enable you to perform a direct search on Toad World from Toad, as well as access other resources such as Knowledge Xpert (included with every copy of Toad and includes PL/SQL developers and a DBA version), AskToad (a Wiki with FAQs and a lot more) and Toad’s own Help.

 

 

We’re sure that searching for educational content in this way will be hugely popular as it will effectively give you direct access to video clips, expert blogs, Oracle technology information and much more in-context with what you are doing, thus dramatically improving your productivity as well as enhancing your knowledge of Toad and Oracle.

  

 

By the way, be sure to check out a completely new set of video clips, blogs and other information specially built for Toad 10 after Toad 10.0 is released.

 

For a comprehensive list of new features and enhancements in Toad 10.0, please refer to the Release Notes.

 

 

 

The Toad for Oracle beta program enables Toad users who are on the full commercial version to perform a side-by-side install of the beta for testing, and providing the Toad development team with direct feedback. New beta programs follow shortly after a new release.

 

The Toad Beta community is hosted by the Toad development team themselves so can provide instant dialogue with beta testers which means any tweaks can literally performed in minutes.