Details of TOAD Users Group

I recently attended a daylong seminar about the Oracle front end "Tools for Oracle Applications Developers" or TOAD.  It was one of those few company sponsored events that leave you inspired, more productive and wiser.  One of the best things about it is that the presenters were very candid about their company, Quest Software, and the Toad product.  The depth and breadth of their candor led me to believe that their company operated this way and that it wasn't just a put-on for the public.  They discussed competing products and talked freely about the shortcomings of their own product.  Steven Feuerstein, the author of several Oracle books, is employed by them as some kind of court jester.  He gave a sarcastic presentation that seemed to make the other Quest employees cringe.  They were open about the fact that Toad sometimes crashes and had to close down toad once or twice during the presentations.   The coolest insights I got from the training are:  1. Use Toad to model my SQL before I stick it in a web application.  That is, Toad knows Oracle SQL and your table structure.  You can write queries in toad and it will correct them and sometimes build them for you.  2.  I always thought that there was some reason beyond my understanding that Oracle didn't have a Boolean datatype.  This secret reason must be so powerful as to make up for the pain caused when I use numeric 0 and 1 for Booleans while the people upstairs use 'T' and 'F' and people downstairs use 'Y' and 'N'   Steven Feuerstein assured me that it should have them and the way to work around their absence is by hiding Booleans in a function.

The SWAG was pretty good for a free seminar (breakfast, lunch, nice lined notebook).  They tossed Toad T-shirts to audience members that answered questions.  Overeager for a T-shirt, I answered several questions only to see mine tossed by mistake to another joker who had given the wrong answer! 

 
• Toad effects a division of labor between client and server.  Some stuff is done on the user's desktop while other work is left to the oracle server. 
• Plethora (thanks Three Amigos!) of options available from right mouse click.
• Toad's Help, Code advice and tuning advice is generated from O'Reilly books
• Options menu in Toad are worth a careful study. You can customize everything.  Examples:
  • Show synonyms and views on table selector.
  • Safety features turned on and off.  Example:  Allow compiling when source came from database.  This would prevent overwriting a proc that was working just fine.
  • allow queries and data grid fetches that are taking too long to be cancled.
  • Save only valid SQL statements in SQL History List
• Scripting macros in Toad may be coming soon. I was encouraged to join the Toad list on Yahoo! Groups to plead for speedy inclusion of macros.  Apparently, Quest employees are heavily engaged in the discussion there.
• SQL+ functionality can be called up in Toad through the SQL Plus window by chosing "Execute SQL in SQL+"
• Formatter Plus.
  • Part of Basic TOAD.
  • It will do code review for you. It will also tell you if your code will work with Oracle 6/7/8/9 etc.
  • You can run it outside of TOAD!
  • Formatter plus will even tell you if your comments are good enough.
• Toad lets you spool generated SQL statements to a file or to the screen as your PL/SQL runs, with your variables filled in. This is about like printing your SQL to the web page that it is generating. An attendee asked if there was a way to append to previous SQL output but there isn't. this feature may be coming???
• Toad has many templates. PL/SQL templates are very cool.  Cut down on errors and speed code development.
• What is not in Basic TOAD
  • PL/SQL Debugger is extra. (around $300)
  • Knowledge expert is super pumped help files (around ???). It has quizes!
  • Profiler is extra (around ???) and you have to install it on server. It is very cool. You see a chart of execution times. Then if you click on one of the bars of the chart, you drill down and see execution time for each line of code!
  • DBA Module is extra
• Good lessons from speaker Steve Feuerstein, author of several O'Reilly books.
  • Don't duplicate SQL in your code.
  • Don't rely on Environment features in your code.
  • Make SQL disappear from your application.
  • Base variable type on a column in your database instead of hard coding that data type in your code.
  • Oracle 9 has same parser for PL/SQL as it's parser for SQL. this means that the old advice to never use implicit cursor is out the window.