May
27
Written by:
Ben Boise
5/27/2009
In this series of blog topics, I will attempt to translate certain features in Toad for Data Analysts for those of you who are more familiar with Toad for Oracle. As you may (or may not) know, Quest Software allows licensed owners of Toad for Oracle 9.7 to use Toad for Data Analysts free of charge! Toad for Data Analysts is Quest Software’s cross-database platform Query and Reporting tool. For Developers and DBAs who work predominately in Oracle, but have the need to query and/or report against other database platforms (SQL Server, DB2, and Sybase, just to name a few), then the pairing of Toad for Oracle and Toad for Data Analysts is for you.
I assume the audience is already familiar with Toad for Oracle. I do not intend to do an in depth feature by feature comparison of Toad for Oracle and Toad for Data Analysts. I’m merely attempting to get you comfortable enough with using Toad for Data Analysts so that you can quickly begin to explore and use this wonderful solution.
Two things to remember
Your two best friends in Toad for Oracle, right-mouse click and F1, are still your best friends in Toad for Data Analysts. F1 loads the help topic for the window that you have active and as you already know, the help system is wonderfully, well, helpful. Right-mouse click exposes additional functionality all throughout Toad for Data Analysts. So, remember you can still right-mouse click on an object to perform operations on the object and you can right-mouse click in a data grid to export to other formats. These are just a couple of the right-mouse click features so please remember to use this feature within Toad for Data Analysts.
How do I connect to the database?
Before you can do anything, you have to establish a connection to the database. Naturally, the first step is showing you how to establish these connections. You can create connections two ways in Toad for Data Analysts. You can select the File | New | Connection menu to begin the process or you can use the Connection Manager. To activate the Connection Manager, select the View | Connection Manager menu. This will activate the Connection Manager which exists as a fly-out menu on the left-hand side of the screen:
- The red box on the View menu highlights where to activate the Connection Manager. The red box on the lower left side of the screenshot shows where this fly-out menu appears.
Once the fly-out is active, I can click the push-pin icon to keep the menu visible (just like you would the Object Palette or Code Snippets menus in Toad for Oracle).
I then click the plug icon with one star as highlighted by the red box below:
- Please note that your Connection Manager may look different than the one shown above. Clearly, I’ve already created multiple connections.
This brings up the New Connection screen. If I click the Pick a group… drop-down box, I see the following:
Toad for Data Analysts allows me to work with multiple database platforms and I can group my connections according to the database platform I need to work with. This makes it easier to organize my connections. Select the database platform you need to connect to and provide the appropriate details for that connection. The details you need to supply will vary depending upon the platform you’re working with. You can choose to connect to the database using the details that you’ve provided or simply save the connection information for use at a later date.
If I choose to make a connection to the database, the icon for that connection will change. The plug icon will show a green circle with a white arrow inside to indicate that a particular connection is active:
The red boxes show that I can establish a connection to any database platform within Toad for Data Analysts. In the above screen shot, I’ve connected to an Access data source and an Oracle data source. No more switching between various applications to work with those different database systems.
Now that you’ve connected to the database, it’s time to get to work. Stay tuned for the next update where we’ll discuss working with objects.