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 walk you through two enhancements to some existing functionality. The first is the Health Check.
First introduced in 2002 with version 7.3, the Health Check is a reporting tool which reports on the health of your database instance and schema. Health Check is found under the Database | Diagnose menu.
For this release, we have added a new category called Vulnerability Assessment which looks specifically at potential security breaches in your Oracle database through the user accounts (things like - which users have the DBA role granted, where you have database links which use passwords and where you have Oracle or 3rd party user accounts which are still using the default password)
Once the window is opened, you can select which database(s) you want to check in the database list in the left “Databases:” panel. You then select which checks you want to make. For the Schema checks, click the Schemas tab and select which schemas you wish to check.
If you want to preserve the Health Check results (for baselining and comparison later), Check 5 lets you store the results in a table called TOAD_HEALTH_CHECK in the TOAD schema.
Some of the checks allow you to adjust the parameter settings. For example, Check 84 lists any insecure Oracle Initialization Parameters. You can choose which ones you wish to check by clicking on the word “adjust” and pressing the
button to open the appropriate dialog.
OK, so let’s assume you’re a DBA and you want to assess your database/schema health and run the VA checks once a month. Well, you can schedule the whole thing. You can specify what format you want the report in (HTML, RTF or Text), then click the Schedule button and open the Windows Task Scheduler dialog. Simply follow the steps to create the Scheduler task and you’ll automatically have your Health Check reports created for you.
The next enhancement I want to show you is to the PL/SQL Profiler. This feature has been in Toad for many years and is available in the Base edition (we also added the Hierarchical Profiler in the 9.5 release for those of you on Oracle 11g).
The PL/SQL Profiler lets you see where you might have a performance bottleneck in your PL/SQL code by timing how long each line of code takes to execute and how many times loops iterate.
For the 9.6 release, we’ve provided better interaction between the analysis window and the Editor window and improved the flexibility of the reports.
There’s a new “Details” button in the Profiler tab which gives you much easier access to the Profiler Analysis window. Selecting a line item in the expanded list in the Profiler tab highlights the line of code in the Editor.
There are also more display options for the graphs. These include being able to rotate the graph (pie or bar chart) by 90 degrees.
Look for Part 3 of this Blog coming to Toad World very soon, where we’ll examine some exiting changes to the way the Editor Insight works, new integration points with other Quest products and lots more !