How often are you offered less work or fewer responsibilities? Rarely does that ever happen, and if it does, it could be a bad sign! Well, as a database administrator, your job gets more and more complex every day even as RDBMS vendors keep adding ‘automated management’ features. On top of all your day-to-day tasks and preventive maintenance you perform, your most pressing tasks are playing firefighter with the proverbial fires in the database.

 

The number of problems you face is only matched by the number of tools and ‘solutions’ to choose from that offer to address these problems. Of course many of you have already found Toad. I’m going to guess that you use Toad in concert with the utilities that Oracle provides to help you accomplish your job. Whether you choose to go exclusive 3^rd party, exclusive vendor toolset, or a mishmash, the important thing to remember is that you feel comfortable and have a tool at hand to handle every scenario when it rears its ugly head.

 

Quest has just released a new exciting package for Oracle Database Administrators, and I wanted to take a few minutes (I’m a fast typer!) to make sure you realize what you now have available: a seat-based, low priced toolset that helps you Administer, Diagnose, and Tune your Oracle 7 – 11g databases.

 

 

Bert Scalzo has already blogged a bit about this topic. Toad 9.6 will for the first time have a screen that can show you your database objects for multiple databases AND allow you to drill down to the specific schema objects for each database. There are a few other big improvements coming and John will be talking about them shortly. One last thing to mention about Toad is the incredibly useful and new ‘Security’ section for the Database Health Check Be sure to check this out if you’re already participating in the Beta program.

 

Spotlight is one of the most well known products here at Quest, and for good reason! As a DBA you need to be able to detect and diagnose problems with your database as fast as possible to minimize downtime and delays. Now available with Toad, you can use it to watch all of your production databases, have it send you email alerts, replay activity to see what happened while you were away, and much more. Each ‘pretty’ visual indicator in the product can impart a ton of information at a quick glance. The tool is able to observe your database activity to set a series of internal benchmarks. When this activity increases or decreases, you get an instant visual cue via the product. When a problem is detected, you can immediately drill down into the warning and see the raw data causing the problem, e.g. a database lock caused by a rogue process belonging to a program running when it shouldn’t be. In addition, we provide a ton of Oracle specific documentation and notes so you can learn more about the problem and how to address it now and prevent it in the future.

 

 

I used to live in the command-line world, and I had my set of scripts that kept me warm at night. I still have and use a lot of these, but I’m also glad I don’t have to work in the ‘real world’ anymore. My scripts we’re often invalidated with every database upgrade, and often times didn’t work the way I intended them to. Of course Toad helped me a lot by letting me organize them and run them fairly quickly, but I can’t imagine having to do so for upwards of 20 production databases versus the 1-2 I had to deal with back then. Spotlight lets me concentrate on the task at hand and get quick and easy access to the data I need to make decisions.

 

Perhaps the best thing going for Spotlight is the resources and brains Quest is investing in the technology. Guy Harrison has been doing database optimization and tuning in the Oracle space for the last 15 years. You can read his dedicated series here on ToadWorld!

 

 

Ever inherit a poorly documented database or application? I’m sure that’s RARELY the case, but if it ever happens to you, it’s very handy to have a tool that can completely reverse engineer the database into a physical data model and publish it to HTML so it can be viewed by you or your team.

 

What’s that? You actually get a vote when it comes to designing the data model for your in-house applications? That’s great! If you don’t have access to a modeling tool, and have been resorting to use MS Visio or a whiteboard, it’s time to take advantage of Toad Data Modeler. You can:

 

This tool allows you to make apples-to-apples comparisons to changes in your database setup. Want to patch to the latest version of 10gR2? Run a test prior to and after the upgrade and know right away what to expect in terms of response time and maximum user load on the system before your performance SLAs are invalidated.

 

Establishing the robustness of your database is as easy as:

Have you found a problematic SQL statement adversely affecting performance in your Oracle database? If you’re using the tools mentioned above, then you should already be aware that Quest can identify these queries from scanning your database objects and development source code BEFORE it reaches production. If you are suffering in a production environment, then we can also analyze your SGA. Unfortunately finding the problem is only the first step. You must now fix the problem with minimal impact to the rest of the system as soon as possible.

 

Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle can accept tuning jobs from Toad and Spotlight with a single click. Sit back and relax while it tackles all of your problematic SQL with its SQL Tuning Queue. We’ll let you know which statements were able to be re-written with better execution plans, but more importantly with better execution times. We can also analyze your existing indexes and propose replacements or addition ones.

 

Adding indexes is never a trivial task for any database. We can create multiple indexes, test the affected SQL, then come back with the index set that makes the most sense for your scenario. You can publish the index with confidence using our Impact Analysis feature. We tell you WHICH database objects are positively, negatively, or NOT AT ALL impacted by your proposed database plan change.   One last thing – don’t forget to update your data model with Toad Data Modeler!

 

When you invest in a Quest solution, you get much more than the products listed above. You also invest in Quest’s 20+ years long experience in the database tools market, its industry experts, its 95% Customer Satisfaction-rated Support organization, and the thousands of fellow users. When you encounter a problem, you will NOT be alone. Each product in the Toad DBA Suite for Oracle enjoys its own dedicated community forum where users can interact with the Quest developers and fellow users.