There are many different types of Toad^® users, and since job titles and descriptions vary so widely, it’s tough to say a typical Toad user looks like this and thus needs this. Thus Toad has evolved over time to meet the ever growing needs of our customers. Quest has two key Toad Yahoo discussion groups to facilitate the evolution and revolution of Toad The first group, groups.yahoo.com/group/toad, provides a useful and open public forum for Toad users to communicate with each other and the development team. Some of the best Toad “tips & tricks”, advice and troubleshooting comes from this forum. The second group, groups.yahoo.com/group/toadbeta, is a private forum (i.e. free, but must enroll) for Toad users to participate in the Toad beta program – which runs almost year round. This is the single best way to test drive upcoming new features – and to assist development in meeting your needs. Let’s look at an exciting new and available Toad 9.6 beta feature for the DBA Module – the new and improved Database Browser, shown below.

Now Toad first became famous and popular due to its “tabbed”  interface for the Schema Browser. Rather than using the more common tree-view control to navigate the database structures, which requires excessive up and down scrolling on medium to large databases, Toad introduced the novel “tabbed”  interface to database objects – which other products have since copied. Since imitation is supposedly the greatest form of flattery – I guess we should be happy with that.

Anyhow, let’s examine what’s changed with the Database Browser. PL/SQL developers are very happy with the “tabbed”  Schema Browser interface – because its focus is all the objects they commonly need to work with. And since they tend to spend more time in any given database connection, it’s really no big deal for them to have to open a new Schema Browser window for each. But DBA’s tend to jump around or switch connections much more “ad-hoc”. So requiring a new Schema Browser window per connection is not quite as elegant a solution for some. Now the old Database Browser window gave them a nice and simple tree view to organize and quickly navigate all those connections – while also providing some nice database instance summarization information. But to then drill down further, a double click on a database would then open a Schema Browser window for that database connection. So while getting Schema Browser windows open was expedited, the process still required too many Schema Browser windows and lots of jumping around among those screens. 

That’s the problem which the new Database Browser more effectively addresses. Now all true database level objects (i.e. objects that are public or not owned by a user schema) are now displayed in a tree-view for that database connection. And clicking on such an entry results in the Database Browser displaying the Schema Browser info for those objects, as shown below. Because when you stop and think about it, the Schema Browser handling database level objects like users, roles, profiles, tablespaces, etc. makes very little sense, especially to some DBAs. So those users now have a simple and centralized method to access true database level objects – and all from within a single screen! And since the Schema Browser is fully user configurable – these users can now choose to “turn-off” those tabs in the Schema Browser if they so choose. You gotta love Toad.