So, another version of Toad has been released. It happens a few times a year. If you’re lucky it’s up to you if and when you want to upgrade to get your bug fixes or new features. If you’re in a larger organization, there’s a standards committee that decides who gets what when. I thought I’d spend a few minutes to document what I see to be the key features available in v9.7 that would give someone serious reason to upgrade today versus later. I’ll break this down by our standard user personas:
- Analysts (People who go into the database that don’t fall into the other 2 categories)
- Developers (Applications or PL/SQL)
- Administrators (System or Oracle)
Here are a few reasons that apply to everyone equally:
- 66 bug fixes since the 9.6.1 release
- Additional support for 11g
- You want to stay current on support (we now officially support v9.7, 9.6.1, and 9.5).
Now, for the fun stuff J
Analysts
- Access to Access, Excel, MS SQL Server, DB2, and Sybase ASE
- Easily schedule your queries, generate spreadsheets, email them to your loyal users
Access to Access, Excel, MS SQL Server, DB2, and Sybase ASE
Chances are you have critical business information stored somewhere other than Oracle. If you love Toad for its ease of use to getting your data in and out of the database, then you need to upgrade to v9.7 right away. Toad now ships with our Toad for Data Analysis product which extends connectivity to ANY database platform. You can read more about this
here.
Easily schedule your queries, generate spreadsheets, email them to your loyal users
Toad’s automation technology has taken a quantum leap with v9.7. If you can figure out how to point and click, then you can easily schedule Toad to run just about any task you would normally do ad-hoc. This includes, but is not limited to,
- Connect and execute one or more queries or scripts
- Export results to the format (file) of your choice
- Email them to colleagues
- FTP them to remote destinations
- Add them to Archives (ZIP) for historical purposes
If you’re in the editor, you can take any query result set and click on the ‘Schedule Action’ button to tell Toad to make this available as a macro. You can additionally open the Toad AppsDesigner window and manually build out your automation tasks.
Look for the ‘Schedule’ button your favorite screens to immediately setup that operation as a Toad macro for replay on demand or as a scheduled event.
Toad’s AppsDesigner empowers the Toad user to take their favorite Toad utilities and invoke them for specific tasks. These can be put together to build very powerful little programs or Toad applets. This blog doesn’t provide the space necessary to give a full walk-through, but I do not think it is an understatement to say that this is the single biggest improvement to the product for v9.7.
Create new ‘Applets’, see their run history, schedule them to run whenever you want. Toad can ‘wake up’ your machine and run your program while you are away from your desk.
Developers
- Full support for Subversion source control (file-based AND via Team Coding)
- Formatter updated to recognize and support 10 and 11g syntax
- Generate test data for your tables on the fly
Full support for Subversion
This has already been
covered in an excellent blog by Toad’s Product Manager, John Pocknell. I just wanted to make sure it’s not overlooked!
Updated Formatter
You will want to read the release notes for information of formatting styles that have been changed to reflect the new options dialog. A big improvement also includes the ability to preview your syntax change directly in the formatter options dialog so you can see exactly who your code will look before and after a format.
No more guessing how your code will look based on a particular formatting option. The best formatting engine for Oracle just got a LOT better folks!
Generate Test Data
Available in the Professional edition or with the DB Admin module, Toad’s ‘Generate Data’ feature allows a user to take one or more tables and generate large amounts of test data. The engine will even obey the RI constraints and generate PK/FK key values between parent and child tables. A large number of datatypes are followed and this feature should continue to grow even more powerful based on feedback from our Toad users.
Right-click anywhere you see a Table in Toad to access the ‘Generate Data’ feature.
Administrators
- Trace File Browser
- Improvements to Compare Schemas and Health Check
- RMAN interface
Trace File Browser
Tired of TKProf? Want to easily SEE your queries with execution time breakdowns, waits, and bind variable values all in context with execution plans? This is all available with Toad’s DB Admin module under Database > Diagnose > Trace File Browser.
This feature will change how you treat and view Trace files. Seriously. Upgrade. Now.
Improvements to Compare Schemas and DB Health Check
For Compare Schemas, you can now easily compare 1 source schema to MULTIPLE destination schemas. Want to see how PRODUCTION differs from TEST and DEVELOPMENT? It’s a single compare now. And, you can easily generate a baseline definition of your schema to be used later as a point-in-time comparison versus going against the schema source live.
Database Health Check’s interface has been streamlined and should just be easier to run in general. It has also been hooked up to Toad’s automation engine (as was Compare Schemas), so you can easily schedule it to run various checks against various instances whenever you want and email you the results. Want an email every 12hrs with updates on ORA-00600 alerts? Want a list of tables missing indexes every week? This is now a trivial task with Toad v9.7. You can additionally tell Toad to save the results in a repository so you can see the differences in your database since the last Health Check.
Summary
There are many new cool features in Toad. You can see a more comprehensive discussion in the release notes and in the ‘
Get To Know’ document series on ToadWorld. I also want to throw a quick note out there on the installer. It should do a much better job on detecting older copies of Toad installed on your machine and offering to upgrade them.