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 he discovered the HTML Schema Doc Generator feature in Toad for Oracle. With a few clicks, he was able to build a report containing all relevant information needed for our documentation. Well, Toad for DB2 offers the same capability.
To generate a Schema Report, in Toad for DB2, select one or more schemas in the Database Explorer. Next, simply right-mouse click and select the Send To | Schema Report menu. You should see something similar to the below screenshot:
There are two sides of this screen that allow you to customize your report. The left-hand side shows you the list of objects that will be included in the report. If you wish to remove an object from the report, you can select it and hit the Delete key to remove it. The right-hand side contains the settings for the report. You can use these settings to refine the information you wish to include in the report. Once you’ve refined the object list as well as the report settings, you can select Schema Report | Generate from the menu, or click the button on the toolbar highlighted in red below:
A new tab will display the report:
The toolbar in the Report Preview tab provides additional functionality, such as adding a watermark, changing the report background and saving the report and emailing it as other types of files like PDF and Excel. If I make changes and want to refresh the report, I’ll need to click the icon shown in red below:
Anyone having to produce this kind of documentation may find this feature of Toad for DB2 to be a huge time saver. Feel free to tell the boss it’ll still take 4 hours. What you do with your free time is your business ;-)