I have worn many different hats here at Quest, and recently put on another in the Sales organization. Regardless of what my official title has been, talking to our Toad customers has always been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career. I decided a long time ago that I would do all I could to master Toad and share my findings with others. I hope to never stop learning or sharing!
One of the more intense experiences is probably working a Toad booth at the Oracle Open World event. I probably spoke to about 200 hundred people over 4 days this past week. Between delivering product demonstrations, answering quick questions, and everything else you can imagine, my frequently asked questions boiled down to the following:
Free tools versus commercial 3rd party – please discuss why I should invest in Toad.
Great question. First of all, I doubt you would just take my word for it, but I am more than happy to share my experiences with you and we can take a look at how Toad (and our other tools) can help augment your experience with Oracle. I still use notepad everyday, but I couldn’t live without Word. Let me show you a few examples of how this extends to SQL*Plus and a tool like Toad…
Why did you change the way Toad works in the area of XYZ?
One of Toad’s biggest assets is the size of its user base. All users benefit from having the collective input and 10+ years of influence over the development of the product. Of course one of the inherent challenges is being able to create a Toad that is all things to all people. The Toad team wants to deliver a tool that gets out of the way and makes your professional life as productive as possible. That being said, something done to address a knock on Toad’s sharp learning curve for new users, e.g. combining the SQL and Procedure editor windows, inevitably causes consternation for a large percentage of the long term users. The question is one of action versus inertia: the dilemma we struggle with is the decision to do nothing to the product or to take a closer step to perfection with each release. The Toad road may be bumpy at times, but we still think it’s the best way out there!
Quest depends on the feedback of our customers. Tell Support what you think and be sure to report your problems. Join our user communities and take part in our beta programs. Read the release notes and help – it’s not just for noobs.
So what’s in the new version of Toad?
Wow, well that depends. What do you use the tool for, and what version of Toad are you on today? If you are a DBA, then I would make sure you are on version 9.5 so you can take advantage of our support for AWR and Statspack. If you are a developer, then you’ll want to take a look at our new 11g Profiler support and the latest Quest SQL Optimizer for your problematic SQL statements. I bet you have been using Toad for years though and have never noticed our Project Manager, Master Detail Browser, or Data Subset Wizards though. Go check those out when you get a chance!
Don’t miss the cool stuff just underneath the surface!
What is Toad World, and why should I care about it?
10+ years of product history + a million or so users + FAQs and Tips’N’Tricks = a plethora of information available to share with you! Toad World is the mechanism that allows us to share en masse with our loyal users everything we know about Toad. It’s free. It gives you the keys to the toad castle. You can read it when you have time, or choose to receive our monthly newsletter. Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by Toad when there is so much help out there for just that is just a click away.
What is the deal with all of the different Toads?
In the beginning, there was T.O.A.D., and it was good. It was your Swiss army knife for Oracle, and was the coolest thing since sliced bread for developers and DBAs. As it got to be more popular, it was made available for people who work with MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2. Now you can get a best-of-breed IDE for each of the major RDBMS vendors. They are separate products, and are licensed separately (MySQL edition is free!).
We’ve also recently made 2 additions to the Toad family: Toad for Data Analysis (TDA) and Toad Data Modeler (TDM). TDA is for the non-developer/DBA who wants the power of Toad to work with their data but without the complexity of a full-borne IDE. TDM is a modeling tool that allows you to build logical and physical ERDs for most of your major RDMBS platforms, build visual reports, and reverse-engineer your existing databases. These are sold separately from Toad, and have multi-RDBMS connectivity and support at a single price point.
How does your Tuning technology interact with the Oracle Optimizer?
This is a question deserving its own blog, but here is the $2 answer: Quest SQL Optimizer analyzes a SQL statement based on its Execution Plan and advises you on whether it SHOULD be tuned or not. If you choose to tune it, then the program finds for you all of the equivalent SQL statements that have unique execution plans and return the EXACT same result set. We then execute these re-writes for you and let you know if we found one that works faster than your original problematic one. This only reflects about 10% of the functionality offered by this technology, but is generally seen as the primary feature of the product. Here is the question you should be asking yourself, “How much time do you spend trying to make your SQL run faster?” If you’re not comfortable with your answer, then take a look at our automated tuning solution.
Coming Soon…
An in-depth look at Statspack vs. AWR for our DBA users!