A Q&A session with Toolbox for IT blogger, Oracle Ace and published author, Lewis Cunningham and Bert Scalzo, Oracle Database Expert and co-author of Database Benchmarking for Oracle and SQL Server. Questions and Answers Cunningham: First off, who is Quest Software? Scalzo: Quest Software is a leading enterprise systems management vendor. We deliver innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments. We have deep expertise in IT operations and have helped more than 100,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. We help organizations deliver, manage and control complex database environments through award-winning products for Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase and MySQL. Quest Software has offices around the globe and you can visit our Website at www.quest.com. Cunningham: Now, Who is Bert Scalzo? Scalzo: I’ve worked with Oracle databases for well over two decades. My key areas of interest include data modeling, database benchmarking, database tuning and optimization, “Star Schema” data warehouses and Linux. I’ve authored several books, including Oracle DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schema and the Toad® Pocket Reference. I also co-authored Database Benchmarking for Oracle and SQL Server. Cunningham: Who is Quest writing Toad for? Who uses Toad? Scalzo: Quest has been selling Toad for over 10 years and the product has over a million users world wide. Toad is for everyone that works with Oracle databases, regardless of job function or past experience with Toad. Cunningham: Is Toad just for developers? Scalzo: Toad is not just for developers: a growing percentage of customers use Toad either as their primary database administration tool or as a handy complement to Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). Accordingly, Quest offers two DBA-oriented bundles. The Toad DBA Suite for Oracle provides many advanced database administration features, including ASM manager, auditing, compare and sync schemas, database Health Check, database monitor, index monitor, and GUI interfaces to DBMS_FLASHBACK and DBMS_REDEFINITION. This suite also offers three additional critical facilities: Toad Data Modeler, Benchmark Factory® for Databases, and a single instance copy of Quest Spotlight® on Oracle. Cunningham: What does Toad offer for developers? Scalzo: First is the base Toad for Oracle edition, which started the whole phenomenon. It offers far too many features to list, but there’s a brief description of it in the technical brief. People genuinely love this product, often reporting they cannot do their jobs without it. Cunningham: To me, the big features of Toad are the PL/SQL and SQL editors. Toad also offers code profiling, debugging, testing, optimization and tun ing. Scalzo: Some time ago, Quest added a great new productivity enhancement to Toad for Oracle called Project Manager. Project Manager works like Schema Browser but it allows you to save just those items that you need on a project basis. That saves time and confusion. Project manager is also 100% configurable. Toad has always had the ability to automate certain screens to run from the command line, but it required a little learning curve that frankly people seemed to feel was just too much. Many of users asked us to make a toolset for Toad that would allow them to create their own logical organization or workflow for basic, low level tasks. Application Designer, available beginning in Toad for Oracle 9.7, does just that; it is robust and capable, but requires only simple GUI interaction, with nothing else to learn. One of the most common development and test database tasks is to refresh data for users to run their code against. For this, many developers use the Oracle import and export utilities. But you really cannot see into a dump file, other than to ask for a table of con tents. Frankly, that’s just not good enough. What is needed is a tool something like WinZip—a utility that enables me to “peek” inside the dump file and select what I want. Using the Toad Export File Browser to peek inside a dump file, this problem is solved. The Export File Browser is available by selecting Database | Export | Export File Browser. There’s really nothing else out there like the Export File Browser. Developers want to write better code; DBAs want to find any code that doesn’t perform well. Toad helps solve both of these challenges with Code Xpert, available in the Toad for Oracle Professional edition. SQL may be a simple language in terms of commands, but writing SELECT statements can be both an art and a science unto itself. I’ve seen five-line SELECTs that take several hours to run and 100-line SELECTs that take just seconds to run. When you start regularly using more complex SQL features such as joins, subselects, correlated sub-queries, group by, having, and order by, predicting and tuning the performance of a query can become a daunting challenge. As we saw in the previous section, Code Xpert can help you find a problematic query very quickly. But once you find it, then you need to fix it so it runs faster. And fixing a complex query can be quite difficult. Again Toad comes to the rescue. Toad for Oracle Xpert edition’s SQL Optimizer can help you tune a query – even automatically tune it for you – and validate that you have the best-performing SQL, no matter how complex the query is. Cunningham: Thank you Bert.
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