It’s almost that time again as another exciting new release of Toad draws closer !
We’ve decided that, rather than let you wait until this release of Toad before you see what’s new, we’ll give you a little fore-taste now !
The emphasis on this release is to simultaneously continue to add value through enhanced individual and team-oriented productivity and automation, increased support for improving code quality, robustness and performance as well as continuing to improve product performance and stability.
In this blog, I want to first introduce some changes to the Editor; specifically what we call Toad Insight or what you may refer to as “dot lookup”.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, if you type a SQL statement in the Editor and you’re not sure (for example) which table columns you want to specify, after you type the table name followed by a period (or dot), Toad will open a pop-up panel which lists all the columns for that table, allowing you to select which one(s) you require.
You can also use Toad Insight to help when you’re using unfamiliar Packages and you’re not sure what the arguments are, or the correct order.
Previously, this operation was limited to the schema to which you were connected. In 9.6, we (optionally) allow you to cache objects from other schemas allowing you to perform lookups from other schemas. In this example, you can see that, because I have connections to both the QUEST_PROD and QUEST_OPTI schemas, I can lookup objects from both within the Editor window.
There are some new options which allow you to control how this works. For example which object types you wish to have cached. Go to the Editor options and look for Code Assist and you’ll see a new panel called Toad Insight Objects. You can uncheck object types you are not working with and thereby reduce the cache size.
For some time now, you’ve been able to launch other Quest and Windows applications from the Toad toolbar using the Configure/Execute External Tools feature.
In this release, however, we’ve added more workflow integration like we have right now with the SQL Optimizer and Benchmark Factory for Databases.
We’ve integrated two more Quest products – Quest Code Tester for Oracle and Toad Data Modeler (must be Toad Data Modeler version 3.1 or higher).
Quest Code Tester for Oracle is the first and only automated PL/SQL code testing tool available. Created by one of the world’s most prominent Oracle PL/SQL experts, Steven Feuerstein, Quest Code Tester for Oracle delivers practical and thorough code testing.
For more information on Quest Code Tester for Oracle, please click this link :
Quest Software's Toad® Data Modeler is a cost-effective, yet powerful database modeling and design tool that is built for the individualdeveloper, DBA and data architect.
Toad Data Modeler makes it easier for you to build complex entity relationship models (both logical and physical), synchronize models, generate complex SQL/DDL, create “ALTER” scripts (Oracle only), and reverse engineer legacy databases.
If you have these products already installed on your desktop, Toad 9.6 will auto-detect them so there is nothing you have to do. Let’s look at a couple of use cases where this integration will be extremely useful.
Let’s say you’ve used Quest Code Tester for Oracle and created some test definitions for some of your PL/SQL code and run those tests. Your test definitions and test results are now stored in Code Tester’s repository for safe-keeping.
Now, you’re in a Toad session and you’ve made some alterations to one of those PL/SQL programs that you’d previously tested, and now you’d really like to be able to quickly run your test again without having to launch Code Tester. Well now you can !
Simply right click the code in Schema Browser and select Run Code Tester tests
Please note that Toad will determine, by looking in the Code Tester repository, whether a test definition exists for your program. If it does not, the menu option is not visible.
If a definition does exist, Code Tester will execute (without launching the Code Tester GUI) and your test results will be displayed in the Toad GUI.
A Code Tester button on the results pop-up will enable you to launch Code Tester at this point should you want to alter the test definition, create more test definitions, etc.
If you can think of any other use cases which make sense which enhance workflow between code development and unit testing, please let me know by adding a comment to this blog.
The other scenario I want to discuss is where there are developers, DBAs or their managers who need access to the project data model.
Having access to the current project data model is absolutely essential if development is to build an accurate application schema which respects the needs of the business and its end-users. Normally, this process is problematic since the company usually uses an “enterprise” modeling solution which is beyond the ease-of-use of most developers and DBAs so that you are then reliant on a database designer or architect to provide you with a current diagram of the model.
The requirement may be just to view the model, or to make changes to it, depending on the user’s specific responsibilities. If it’s just to view the model, this can be achieved very simply by using Toad Data Modeler’s HTML report generator. This operation would have to be carried out by somebody authorized to access the data model. Once the report is saved (to a Windows network drive, for example), this HTML report can be linked to all Toad users working on the project using Project Manager (for information on what Project Manager is and how to benefit from it, please click this link :
http://www.toadsoft.com/haveumet.html ). All Toad users on this project now have access to the data model through Project Manager.
However, let’s say you need to directly Reverse Engineer objects from Toad into a Physical data model.
In Toad 9.6, this is now possible using the ER Diagram window. The ER Diagram window has been part of Toad for a number of years, and often, users mistook it as a modeling tool. Well now, you can have the next best thing !
I’m going to open the ER Diagram window (Database | Report | ER Diagram) and drag and drop some objects from the Object Palette (View | Object Palette) into the drawing view.
Next, I press the Save button and save the diagram as a .erd file in the C:\Program Files\Quest Software\Toad for Oracle\User Files\ERDiagrams folder. Once the diagram is saved, the Toad Data Modeler button becomes active on the ER Diagram toolbar
.
Press this button and Toad Data Modeler launches (remember this must be version 3.1 or higher). The Toad database connection is passed across so you only have to enter the password and Reverse Engineering of the objects in your ER Diagram initiates automatically.
Once completed, you will have a brand new Physical data model ready for you to work on in Toad Data Modeler.
In addition to this integration, you also have integration inside Toad Data Modeler 3.1 itself.
One example is the ability to perform Reverse Engineering “on-the-fly” by dragging and dropping objects from a Project Manager panel in Toad Data Modeler (which looks exactly like Project Manager in Toad).
First, you open the required Toad Project Manager file from the file system.
Toad Data Modeler opens the default Toad User Files folder where the Project Manager files are normally stored (they can also be stored on a network share).
Select the Project Manager (.tpr) file you want and it will open inside Toad Data Modeler.
You can even set the icon styles for the objects to be exactly how you would see them in Toad. Now, the REALLY COOL thing is, you can drag and drop objects from the Project Manager panel into an existing Physical data model (provided the diagram window is open) and Reverse Engineering will be initiated automatically and entities created within the model.
So, if you really want to combine the benefits of using Toad and Project Manager to group all the project assets in one place, and share it across your team together with the ability to maintain your project’s data model, you can do it. Project Manager maintains a current list of “links” to the objects in Oracle’s Data Dictionary, so as you request object information via Project Manager, you’re looking at the latest snapshot of that object.
If you can think of any other use cases which make sense which enhance workflow between code development and data modeling, please let me know by adding a comment to this blog.
There are many other features coming in Toad for Oracle 9.6 which I haven’t had the space to include such as more support for Oracle 11g, update to the Import Table Data Wizard, more support for the Windows Task Scheduler but if you want to find out more, go to the Toadworld Home Page and look under the What’s New. There’s a Get To Know Toad 9.6 tutorial which walks you through a lot of the other new features.
Enjoy !