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 ...

One key task for many DBAs is maintaining a database version control or change revision history. Database version control affords the DBA the ability to restore the database to any prior state, or to detect unplanned database revisions that cause the database to be out of compliance with its specification. One could argue that the latter scenario would unlikely happen in a well controlled production environment ...

Ever wonder which indexes are being used in your database? Well Oracle 9i introduced the capability to track index usage. But you had to learn new ALTER INDEX command syntax to support this and then how to query V$OBJECT_USAGE view to see the index usage information. Well I’m too darn lazy, and why not be – as with most things in Oracle, Toad cleanly exposes this feature and increases its us ...

I was working the other day to rebuild my Linux 32 bit cluster in preparation for doing some tests between OEM and PAO for some internal training. I planned to use raw for my cluster configuration and voting files for CRS and ASM for the rest of the shared files. The 32 bit cluster had been up and operating fine and I had completed the testing I was doing so I retasked the drives to build a 64 bit cluster. I dr ...

Sometimes people will request that Toad have a certain special new feature, often special to the task at hand which they’re trying to accomplish. Keeping in mind my recent Toad blog about SQL*Plus compatibility, there are very often easy ways to use existing Toad features to do what the ...

And how many PL/SQL developers are there "out there"?
 

These are surprisingly hard questions to answer. Officially and even unofficially, Oracle Corporation's point people on PL/S ...

Sometimes people will ask why can’t Toad work more like SQL*Plus – and the funny thing is the answer is quite often it does. You really just need to know how SQL*Plus works – and then look for the same feature within Toad. Let’s take a very, very common scenario that gets asked almost every quarter. Look at my SQL*Plus SELECT command in the screen snapshot below. Suppose ...

I recently gave a webcast about using indexes to boost your application performance, of course at the end of the webcast we took questions, unfortunately I wasn’t able to anser all of the questions so I pulled the ones I felt were most important and decided to answer them here in my blog. For the full webcast see :

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 ...