What’s Coming Soon in Toad for Oracle Editions 2018

The next release of Toad for Oracle is coming soon and, as ever, we have some exciting things to tell you about!

Our main theme continues to be workflow simplification for users who may be new to Toad and to help make the transition from traditional, manual Oracle database development to more agile, automated development leveraging Continuous Integration processes and we’ve made significant progress along that road. There is also a new release of Toad DevOps Toolkit which complements this Toad for Oracle release.

Toad DevOps Toolkit brings the dream of seamlessly integrating Oracle database development tasks into a Continuous Integration/Deployment build process closer to reality.

Part of this process relies on having developers use some key components of Toad for Oracle such as static code review (Code Analysis) and PL/SQL unit test generation (Code Tester). We believe we are the only solution in the market that can offer both automated PL/SQL regression test execution and static code reviews which can be integrated with CI. In our experience, this is one of the primary roadblocks that development shops faces as they transition their traditional Oracle database operations into DevOps.

Migration to Oracle databases in the cloud is another trend we are seeing so we have capabilities which can support the management of Oracle databases, including multi-tenant, in the Oracle Database Cloud Service as well as working with Oracle databases in Amazon AWS and MS Azure. Have a read of these blog articles for more information on how to manage Oracle 12c multi-tenant database in the Oracle Cloud using Toad.

Specifically, this Toad for Oracle Editions 2018 release will comprise the following product updates (depending which Toad Editions you own)

• Toad for Oracle 13.0
• Benchmark Factory 8.0.1 – a part of Toad Developer and Toad DBA Editions
• SQL Optimizer for Oracle 9.2.3 – a part of Toad Xpert Edition and higher
• Spotlight on Oracle 10.6 – a part of Toad DBA Edition
• Toad Data Modeler 6.4 – available with ALL Toad Editions
• Code Tester for Oracle 3.4 – a part of Toad Developer Edition

Improving the Toad Freeware/Trial experience

Our Toad Freeware continues to be extremely popular so, for all you freeware users out there, you’ll love this!

The first 30 days of Toad Freeware use will give you full access to all the features in Toad Professional Edition plus all the features in the DB Admin Module. After that time, the freeware will revert to its usual mode showing the Base Edition features. If, during your use of Freeware you would like to evaluate the commercial features again, you just click the Toad for Oracle community link which takes you to Toad World where you can click the Downloads button to download a Trial version.

Figure 1: New Toad Freeware fully featured for 30 days

It might be that you don’t have enough time during the 30 day evaluation period to fully explore what Toad can offer. Currently, the Toad Trial would simply stop working after it expires and you’d have to go get another Trial. What will happen now is that Toad will revert to Freeware mode, which means you can carry on doing some limited evaluation, until you receive your new Trial license which you can enter into Toad’s Licenses window and be up and running again without having to download another Trial version.

Working with 2 monitors?

Good news! Toad has historically worked in MDI (multiple document interface) mode, meaning one window and other Toad windows open inside of it.

With SDI (single document interface), windows become free floating and you can move them around between your 2 monitors. Great if you’re a developer and you spend a lot of time in the Editor. Now you can have multiple Editor windows open and have them displayed anywhere.

To change Toad to SDI mode, you go to the Options > General > Application Style panel.

Figure 2: Changing Toad’s display to SDI mode

Team Coding and Distributed Git Integration (All Toad Editions)

Team Coding is a collaborative developer utility that lets a group of developers access source control, yet work on the actual database objects. Team Coding reconciles the object changes with the VCS files and preserves the integrity of both.

Fed up of having to separately Pull or Push your Git changes to GitHub?

No more! Toad now provides the ability to perform Pull and Push code changes from or to your distributed GitHub repository, saving you the inconvenience of having to leave Toad.

This can be done both from the Team Coding menu and from the VCS tab in Team Coding Manager.  

Figure 3: Performing Pull and Push from/to GitHub inside Toad

Team Coding and Table Rebuild (All Toad Editions)

If you need to perform a Table Rebuild as a consequence of a change that involves changing column locations and you need to protect your data, you can now perform this immediately following a check-out using Team Coding. Table rebuild will create a copy of the table to be changed, move the data, make the change and copy the data back. Team Coding will remap the change history of the changed object back to the original object.

Figure 4: Using Team Coding to check-out and rebuild a table

Team Coding also adds some additional options in the Configuration panel which determine how the DDL scripts arising from schema object changes are handled, including an Oracle database version compatibility check. This ensures that the change script will run on the version of Oracle on the target database.

Code Analysis enhancements (Professional Edition and higher)

Code Analysis is Toad’s static code review feature. This is a rules-based system where you get to determine the quality levels you need in your organization.

To do that, you can create new or clone/modify rule sets that come with Toad.

In this release, we’ve simplified the way you can modify the rules themselves in-situ with the Rules window, which will make using Code Analysis even easier.

Figure 5: Editting Code Analysis rules in-situ

Other key features in this release

In addition to the main items mentioned earlier, these are some of the other features coming in the other components of Toad for Oracle Editions 2018, depending which Edition you have:

• Code Tester for Oracle 3.4 (Toad Developer Edition)
  • Improved repository management with the introduction of a new CTO_ADMIN_ROLE role which, when granted, will only allow that user to manage and perform upgrades to the Code Tester repository.
  • Repository version tolerance, which will allow users on a prior version of the Code Tester client to connect to an older version of the Code Tester repository.
  • SQL Optimizer for Oracle 9.2.3 (Toad Xpert Edition and higher) – Supports the optimization of SQL statements on databases in the Oracle Database Cloud Service.
  • Toad Data Modeler 6.4 (All Toad Editions)
    • Support for new database platforms including:
      • PostgreSQL 10
      • Amazon Redshift 1.0
      • Aurora PostgreSQL 9.5
      • EDB PostgreSQL Advanced Server 10
      • SQL Server 2017
• Data generation via auto generation of Table Insert statements (SQL Server initially)
• New Project Reports which can be output to HTML, RTF and PDF
• Integrate database connections with Toad Edge
• Export models to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format

There will be a new Technical Brief on Toad for Oracle 2018 published shortly which will be available on http://www.quest.com/toad-for-oracle/ so watch this space!