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 Toad 9.7 is released before you see what’s new, we’ll give you a little fore-taste now!  In this final blog (there are 2 parts), I want to cover what’s new for developers.
 

One thing developers and testers often need and find it hard to obtain (apart from a decent pay rise!) is good data. It may sometimes be possible to obtain data from production, but this is problematic, since production data often contains sensitive or personal information which could render the company in breach of data protection legislation.
 

Clearly, creating data manually is too time consuming, so what is needed is a good data generator.

Toad 9.7’s Data Generator is available as part of the Professional edition and enables random data to be generated very quickly for single or multiple tables.

The Data Generator will recognise referential integrity, if it exists, and will also disable primary/foreign key constrains before population and re-enable them afterwards. Data Generator is implemented in 2 places: Schema Browser – table(s) right-click ER Diagrammer – table right-click Simply select a table (or group of tables) in Schema Browser and select Generate Data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The default row count will be set to 1000 per table, but this can be changed, and the total estimated size on the database will be displayed.

The Advanced Options tab enables selection of things like table truncation before population, disable/enable Constraints and Triggers as well as allowing generation of Reproducible Sequences.
 

The minimum and maximum field values can be adjusted for character, number and date values in order to define an effective range.
 

The Show SQL button reveals how Toad generates the data using the Oracle DBMS_RANDOM package and the entire operation can be scheduled using the Windows Task Scheduler.

After generation, where you may have populated referential tables, you can use the Master-Detail Browser (Database menu | Report) to verify to correctness of the data.

In a future release of Toad, we will be enhancing Data Generator further with things like sample data and inter-field dependencies, etc. 

Code Xpert is Toad’s PL/SQL code quality assessment and reporting tool which can be used by individual developers or by team leaders and managers alike to set up and maintain consistent code review rules and coding standards across their projects.
 

This is absolutely essential in order to reduce the number of development cycles due to poor quality and poor performing code, which then has to be re-worked by development. This can be hugely disruptive and expensive.

In this release, we have made a couple of enhancements:

Top 20 Rules was created in order to deal with occasions where a developer simply wants to be able to make a quick assessment of their code to see if there are any silly mistakes before a full-blown code review.
 

These rules have been chosen from the existing Code Xpert rules universe by Steven Feuerstein and Bert Scalzo as being those rules which are of most importance to most developers.

You can see straight away where a problem has been identified and also what the overall Toad Code Rating score is (Green, Yellow, Orange or Red) according to a combination of factors including Halstead, McCabes Cyclomatic and Maintainability Index.
 

Emailing of code review reports is very useful where a team (or project) review may have been carried out by a team leader or manager using the Code Xpert dashboard.

A completed review can now be emailed directly to someone in the organization for review or follow-up. This is sent as a Microsoft Excel attachment.

And appears like this: 

Code Xpert data gets stored in a repository so it may be useful to create a difference report to identify trends, etc.
 

Toad 9.7 gets an upgraded parser and formatter which fully support Oracle11g syntax in the Editor.

Although several customers reported that earlier versions of Toad work fine with the Subversion VCS, Toad 9.7 is now fully certified on Subversion, generally considered to be the successor to CVS (also supported by Toad). This is achieved through native support for the TortoiseSVN interface.
 
http://tortoisesvnscc.tigris.org/servlets/Search?scope=project&resultsPerPage=40&query=download&Button=Go. Toad already supports the Microsoft SCC API interface.
 

Once TortoiseSVN is installed, you can use it directly by opening a file from the Windows file system into the Toad Editor and then performing a check-out from the Editor, or by using Team Coding; Toad’s own code check-out/check-in utility (which links to any VCS). 
 

In order to use TortoiseSVN with Toad’s Team Coding, you will need to install bridging software such as PushOK. http://www.pushok.com/soft_download.php?idprogram=3 

Also watch out for a forthcoming blog on configuring Toad to work with Subversion.
 

Also note that Toad’s Team Coding now supports the ability to check in multiple files at the same time.
 

Toad 9.7 adds basic code refactoring. According to our own PL/SQL expert, Steven Feuerstein, refactoring is a highly structured methodology for going through clearly defined steps (each ideally verified by a pre-defined regression test) to make your code more maintainable.
 

In this release, we have added Extract Procedure. This involves selection of a correctly parsed block of code and extracting it into either a stored or local procedure. 

There are many more exciting things in release which I don’t have space to cover in these blogs, but you can try Toad for Oracle 9.7 Beta NOW simply by clicking this link. http://www.toadsoft.com/beta.html 
 

Download the Full Beta installer first into a separate directory from your current version, then install the Beta Update by downloading the zip and extracting into your new Beta installation folder.
 

The Toad Beta will use your current commercial license key.  So enjoy and please let us know what you think!
 

For a comprehensive list of new features and enhancements in Toad 9.7, please refer to the Release Notes.