Toad® for Oracle v10

Written by
Quest Software Inc.

Technical Brief
© 2009 Quest Software, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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this document may be reproduced or transmitted for any purpose other than the
reader's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc.

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shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or other
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respective owners.

World Headquarters:
5 Polaris Way
Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
e-mail: info@quest.com

Please refer to our Web site (www.quest.com) for regional and international office
information.

Updated—August 2009

TBD-ToadForOracle-v10-AG
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................1
NEW DATA GRIDS .......................................................................................2
NEW ER DIAGRAM .......................................................................................3
NEW SEARCH BAR .......................................................................................5
NEW DIRECT SQL TUNING IN THE EDITOR..................................................6
MULTI-TASK EXECUTION........................................................................... 10
NOW WE ARE TRULY MULTI-TASKING ☺............................................................... 13
SERVER, INSTANCE AND SCHEMA COMPARE ......................................................... 14
ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. ................................................................ 15
CONTACTING QUEST SOFTWARE ....................................................................... 15
CONTACTING QUEST SUPPORT ......................................................................... 15

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 Technical Brief

INTRODUCTION
The latest generation of Toad® for Oracle will soon make its appearance (early
October 2009) so we thought it was time to peel back the covers and give you a
peek at what’s coming.

Toad for Oracle v10 has been a long time coming, primarily due to significant
platform upgrades that now enable Toad to support Unicode.

Toad for Oracle v10 will have both new features and enhancements to existing
features, all designed to augment user workflow and enable you to get your work
done more productively, accurately and with better visibility into your work
environment—whether you are a developer working in an unfamiliar schema or a
DBA trying to manage multiple databases.

Below is a summary of the key user benefits in Toad v10:

1. Usability—enables users to discover more of Toad’s features and ensures

that the tasks they perform offer the maximum productivity and follow a
logical workflow.
2. Automation—provides users with even more capabilities to maximize their
productivity by creating and using automated workflow from regular tasks
performed in Toad.
3. Education—enables users to discover a huge range of services related to
Toad which will both extend their current knowledge and provide expert
help when it’s needed thus providing maximum value from their
investment in Toad.
4. Flexibility—extends the use of Toad into regions where different character
sets are used and provides a much simpler, coherent licensing mechanism.

So let’s get into some of details on what’s coming in Toad v10!

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Toad® for Oracle v10

NEW DATA GRIDS

The Toad platform upgrade provides new data grids. These new grids offer far more
productivity than their predecessors and are now applied throughout Toad so users
will have a lot more consistency when it comes to a data grid’s behavior.

The new data grid shows customizable column headers, column grouping and sub-
grouping as well as sub-totaling of records.

• You’ll notice a new grouping region above the grid where you can drag and
drop column headers that you want to group and sub-group.
• The data grid navigator is now located at the bottom of the grid,
simplifying the toolbar.
• Column selection is now easier. A new button on the top left on the grid
allows you to determine which columns you want to be visible.
• The right-click menu is more simplified and the ‘Save As’ feature has been
renamed as ‘Export Dataset’. The range of file format options to save to
has not changed.

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The simplified column selection. The new right-click menu.

NEW ER DIAGRAM
Developers and DBAs need a simple way to visualize the database schema. The
Toad ER Diagram window serves that purpose very well. The new ERD for Toad v10
is based on the same technology as our successful Toad® Data Modeler product
and therefore provides far more capabilities than its predecessor (particularly when
it comes to graphical manipulation and reporting).

The new ER Diagram showing schema objects.

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Toad® for Oracle v10

There are a number of ways to include or add schema objects into the ER Diagram:

1. Right-click table in Schema Browser (defaults to five referential levels)

2. Use the Add Object button in ER Diagram
3. Drag and drop from Schema Browser
4. Drag and drop from the Object Palette
5. Drag and drop from Project Manager

Zoom, Pan, Loupe and Fit-to-View are all available for maximum flexibility when
working with large schemas. In addition, a grid can be displayed with objects being
snapped-to-grid or objects aligned to each other to enable excellent close-up work.
There is also an Autolayout button.

Notes and a Title block can be added for additional documentation and there is
even a Category feature that allows you to assign a unique color to different
groups of objects.

For printing purposes, multiple formats are supported up to A3 size and there is a
fit-to-page feature.

Workspaces allow specific parts of a complex schema layout to be drawn

separately, where that may be convenient, but the connections to the main
diagram remain.

Diagrams can be exported into .bmp, .png and .jpeg format and reports can be
generated in HTML. The HTML diagram is hyperlinked, allowing you to view object
details simply by clicking on the object in the diagram.

Schema HTML Report.

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As always, if you also have a copy of Toad Data Modeler, you can reverse-engineer
schema objects in the Toad ER Diagram to create a complete physical data model in
Toad Data Modeler.

You can also create data for tables viewed in the diagram (Professional Edition
and above).

NEW SEARCH BAR

Our users are always looking for ways to get the most out of their Toad investment.
Toad World (www.toadworld.com ) provides the latest educational and training
materials, including: videos, tech briefs, white papers, expert blogs, and tech tips
from Toad-family product experts, and is quite popular. We thought it would be a
good idea to enable a Toad user to perform a direct search on Toad World from
Toad, as well as access other resources such as Knowledge Xpert (included with
every copy of Toad and also includes PL/SQL developers and a DBA version) and
AskToad (a Wiki with FAQs and a lot more)!

New Search Bar.

The ability to search for educational content will give you direct access to video
clips, expert blogs, Oracle technology information and much more in-context with
what you are doing. This will save you time and enhance your knowledge of Toad
and Oracle.

Search results (Knowledge Xpert).

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Toad® for Oracle v10

NEW DIRECT SQL TUNING IN THE EDITOR

For those users who already have Toad Xpert Edition or one of our two suites
(Development Suite or DBA Suite), you will already be familiar with the SQL
Optimizer for Oracle. This is also a standalone product. SQL Optimizer is a very
powerful, comprehensive, yet easy to use SQL tuning tool for developers and DBAs.

However, sometimes you need to be able to quickly tune a SQL statement on-the-
fly without opening the SQL Optimizer interface. Or maybe you are an application
developer writing Java or .NET but have an apparent performance problem with a
SQL statement and don’t know what to do. If this is the case, then this new feature
is for you!

Direct SQL tuning in the Editor, as that implies, means giving you with sufficient
capabilities within the Toad Editor itself to provide you with a number of potential
SQL alternatives which perform better than your original. From these alternatives,
you can chose the most suitable to give you the performance improvement you
expect from your application. This new SQL tuning interface uses the power of SQL
Optimizer to do all the “back-end” optimization processing.

You will be able to compare elapsed execution times graphically together with
execution plans and other pertinent information. You still, ultimately, have the
choice as to which SQL statement re-write to use in your application based on the
evidence. Or, you can simply use the one which has the shortest elapsed time. The
best alternative can then replace your original SQL statement leaving you with a
faster application.

It’s that simple.

Here’s the process based on a prototype of what the finished feature will look like:

First, have your problematic SQL statement visible in the Editor, then select Auto
Optimize current SQL. Notice that you can still fully launch the SQL Optimizer from
here too.

Selecting Auto Optimize in the Toad Editor.

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Next, accept the defaults and enter any bind variables if necessary and click OK.

After processing, the SQL Optimizer determines a number of possible alternative

SQL statements from which you can choose, along with all the important evidential
information.

Presentation of suitable SQL alternatives for assessment

You can clearly see which alternative has the lowest elapsed time, but you can also
view other information as necessary. also In addition, you have the option of trying
an index build on a table used in the SQL statement to see if that might have a
higher benefit.

You can compare the original SQL statement to the “best” alternative.

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Toad® for Oracle v10

Comparison of best alternative with original SQL statement.

After deciding on the most suitable alternative, we make it really easy to return this
modified SQL statement into your SQL code or PL/SQL program by simply clicking
the Accept button.

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Replacement of original SQL script with best alternative

This new SQL tuning methodology harnesses the power of our world-class SQL
Optimizer for Oracle technology. However, it is presented in a way that is simple to
use for those less familiar with SQL tuning techniques or those who just want a
very fast, effective solution to a frustrating application performance problem.

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Toad® for Oracle v10

MULTI-TASK EXECUTION
You probably have routine tasks you often have to perform every day or every
week and you probably wish there was some way you could automate them. Here
are a couple of things we think you will like.

The first one is more for DBAs, but developers could use it too—Script Manager.
DBAs sometimes have to run multiple scripts against a number of their managed
databases, but they can only run them one at a time and then they have to repeat
the process for each database. What if you could select ALL of your scripts and run
them simultaneously against ALL of your databases?

Script Manager itself is not a new feature for Toad v10, but the ability to select a
group of database connections against which you need to run a group of scripts is.

Here’s what the new Script Manager window looks like.

The enhanced Script Manager window with connections panel.

The “Connections to use” panel is new. It will be pre-populated with any currently
active connections, but you can use the Add button to select additional ones from
the main Connections window.

You can then highlight the scripts you wish to execute (the same way you did
before) and click the Execute button. This lets you execute scripts in this window or
the Quest ScriptRunner tool. The outputs from each script run will appear in a
tabbed region in the Output tab. See below.

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There is also an options button which lets you select the Editor as the default. A
separate Editor window will open for each connection.

Also notice the “On File Menu” column in the lower data grid in the previous and
following screen shots. Whatever scripts you check here will appear in the following
three places in Toad:

The Script Manager button (down arrow):

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Toad® for Oracle v10

Project Manager (via the connections tab):

Database Browser (right click a database instance): This part is new for Toad v10.

This gives you the flexibility to run one of more regularly executed scripts on-the-
fly (without having to open the Script Manager window) from multiple places where
it is most logical to do so.

The Database Browser launch point is perhaps the most likely, since DBAs can use
it to view all of their servers and databases in one single screen.

Another type of multi-task execution which is now available in Toad v10 is an

extension to our current AppDesigner feature (this feature will be called Automation
Designer in Toad v10).

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 Technical Brief

Automation Designer allows you to save tasks you normally perform interactively in
Toad, (from saving data to a file, comparing two schemas to running a database
health check) select and execute them on-the-fly. For more information on this
feature, please refer to this blog article published on Toad World.

In Toad v10, you now have the capability to execute these tasks (or what we call
Actions) or groups of tasks saved as a sequential workflow (or what we call Action
Sets) against multiple database connections simultaneously.

The enhanced Automation Designer showing multi-connection execution.

Here, you can see an Action Set in the right panel with a selection of tasks which
can be executed sequentially, such as Export DDL, Schema reports, script
execution, etc.

If you right-click an App (Action Set), you can select which database connections
you want to run these tasks against. The Connections window opens and you can
multi-select which ones to use.

Now we are truly multi-tasking ☺

With Script Manager and Automation Designer, you can reallocate the time spent
performing routine tasks to focus on more pressing matters.

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Toad® for Oracle v10

Server, Instance and Schema Compare

Single-window server, instance and schema compare makes it easier to manage
and automate the comparison and synchronization of multiple servers hosting
multiple Oracle databases with different configurations.

The Toad for Oracle v10 beta program is well underway, enabling Toad users who
are on the full commercial version to perform a side-by-side install of the beta for
testing, and providing the Toad development team with direct feedback.

The Toad Beta community is hosted by the Toad development team so they can
provide instant dialogue with beta testers —this means any tweaks can literally
performed in minutes!

If you are interested in participating, please click this link:

www.toadsoft.com/beta.html

Please note that any future plans represent our intentions as of the date hereof,
and our development plans and priorities are subject to change due to competitive
factors, availability of resources and other matters common to all independent
software vendors. Accordingly, these general indications of development schedules
should not be relied upon if making a purchasing decision and should not be
interpreted or construed as any form of a commitment that Quest will ultimately
release any or all of the above-described products or features on the schedule or in
the order described, or at all. The content, release, and timing of any features or
functionality described above remains at the sole discretion of Quest Software, Inc.

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 Technical Brief

ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC.

Quest Software, Inc., a leading enterprise systems management vendor, delivers
innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity
from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual
environments. Quest also provides customers with client management through its
ScriptLogic subsidiary and server virtualization management through its Vizioncore
subsidiary. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on
what works best, Quest helps more than 100,000 customers worldwide meet higher
expectations for enterprise IT. Quest Software helps organizations deliver, manage
and control complex database environments through award-winning products for
Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase and MySQL. Quest Software can be found in
offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.

Contacting Quest Software

Phone: 949.754.8000 (United States and Canada)
Email: info@quest.com
Mail: Quest Software, Inc.
World Headquarters
5 Polaris Way
Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
USA
Web site www.quest.com

Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.

Contacting Quest Support

Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product
or who have purchased a commercial version and have a valid maintenance
contract. Quest Support provides around the clock coverage with SupportLink, our
web self-service. Visit SupportLink at http://support.quest.com

From SupportLink, you can do the following:

• Quickly find thousands of solutions (Knowledgebase articles/documents).

• Download patches and upgrades.
• Seek help from a Support engineer.
• Log and update your case, and check its status.

View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs,
online services, contact information, and policy and procedures. The guide is
available at: http://support.quest.com/pdfs/Global Support Guide.pdf

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