While we are still quite a few months away from officially releasing the next version of Toad for Oracle, there are a few exciting developments to share with you today. Of course, you can follow the development of the next version of Toad yourself via
the beta program, but we realize not everyone has the bandwidth to do so. Most years will see at least 2 releases of Toad. However, so much is going into Toad v10 that we will only have one release for 2009. That hopefully gives you an idea of just how much work is going into making the world’s #1 tool for Oracle an even better experience for analysts, developers, and DBA’s everywhere.
Here’s what you can get a gander at now:
- Unicode support
- New Data Grids
- New ER Diagrammer
Unicode Support
Toad has offered partial support for Unicode via several different avenues over the past several years. It should be noted that the current version of Toad can be made to display non-English characters and that we in fact have a huge Toad user base in places like India and South Korea where this is a requirement. Toad users have come to expect more than just ‘partial’ support for anything, and we at Quest take pride in responding to input from the field.
The final solution – a version of Toad for Oracle that offers full support for Unicode throughout the product – is now taking shape. I know that the development team has put a lot of their own sweat and blood into this work and I think that our users worldwide will benefit from it greatly.
So, regardless of the data you are working with, Toad can now display it, modify it, and export it to files with Unicode without fear of corruption either on the client or server. Below are a few screenshots of Toad interacting with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese as an example of this.
The editor can now both input and display Unicode data. The data grids can now display both Unicode data and Unicode encoded column names from both single statement executions and Script Output. If you have need of SQL*Plus output commands and Unicode, then Toad’s F5 scripting engine would be the ideal solution.
A DESC (F4) popup window of a Chinese table name with Chinese named columns.
A Korean named table and its Korean named Index.
In the editor, you can now save files with various encodings.
New Data Grids
While the product was being revamped to support the new version of Delphi to accommodate Unicode, the other components ‘under the hood’ also got a chance to get their tune-ups. The most noticeable for the end user will most likely be the Data Grids. This includes of course the grids to show query results and table contents. But, it also includes every single place in Toad where data is being displayed to the user including the ‘Columns’ tab for the Schema Browser ‘Tables’ section.
The grids have some new functionality like the ability to auto-group by specific columns. The grid interface has also been revamped. The grid toolbar and right-hand-mouse popup menus have also gotten a thorough scrubbing. Here are a few examples:
We can see a few new things here:
- Multi-column grouping, 1st level by Department_ID, 2nd level by Job_ID
- Grid cells and headers are now able to display in different fonts and in different colors
- The record navigation has been moved to the bottom and the toolbar has been simplified
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The right-hand-mouse popup menu has also been cleaned up. ‘SaveAs’ as been renamed to the more descriptive ‘Export Dataset’. |
Note that ‘Select Columns’ feature has been moved from the popup menu to the upper left-hand corner of each data grid
New ER Diagrammer
You have been able to build simple entity-relationship diagrams based off a single table in the Schema Browser. This feature has been given a major overhaul and now uses the same visual components as our world-class data modeling tool, Toad Data Modeler. While you will not be able to do full schema database reverse-engineers, if you need to build reports for developers to go against subsets of the database, you will not want to miss out on this feature!
Step One: select the objects you want modeled. Note that you can add objects from ANY schema to the model.
A physical model diagram of the selected objects.
You can now export your models to HTML reports!
When can we expect the next version to be officially released?
We can’t promise an official date, but I would start looking for announcements starting early this fall, or if you’re address falls below the equator, this spring. Again, if you participate in our beta program, you will get updates weekly with new features and news on what to expect.