How Toad® for Oracle Base Edition is better than Toad for Oracle Freeware

Quest® Toad® for Oracle Freeware will come to an end. We posted a few days ago about the sweet-and-sour news here in Toad World.

The sweet news is that we’re thinking of new ways to make our beloved Quest Toad for Oracle Base Edition even more affordable for individual users and small businesses.

The sour news is that we’re sunsetting Toad for Oracle Freeware.

The mix of sweet and sour is our best effort to give you what you’ve been asking for while staying true to the productivity and features that are in the DNA of Toad.

A new way to buy: subscription = full function, support, auto update, auto renew, more!

Our Toad for Oracle Freeware users who have felt stifled by the restrictions of the free product asked for access to the full benefits of the commercial edition. We listened and we’re offering a new way to buy Toad for Oracle Base: by subscription.

Toad for Oracle Freeware users will be especially happy to access all Toad for Oracle Base features: its fully featured editor, PL/SQL debugging, profiling, PL/SQL unit testing, task automation, schema/data compare and full integration with version control — plus tech support. And now, for a limited time, we are offering access to the full product for individuals at a reduced price.

Targeted specifically for Toad for Oracle Freeware users and individual users — we are offering a limited, promotional price of a one-year, single-seat, subscription license to Toad for Oracle Base for US$195.00. That’s US$335 off the regular price. The promotion runs through December 31, 2020.

Why should you subscribe?

• A fully featured, fully functioning Toad with access to support
• Low introductory price – get your first year, single license for only US$195
• Auto updates, so you’re always on the latest and greatest version
• Product education announcements
• Auto-renew for your convenience

If you’re currently using freeware, keep reading to discover the benefits of Toad for Oracle Base.

Upgrading from Toad for Oracle Freeware to Toad for Oracle Base — 7 ways to boost your productivity

1: Concurrent connections

One-handed juggling is pretty slow going. But when you use two hands, you can really accomplish something. So why settle for the single active connection to databases and schemas that you got with Toad for Oracle Freeware?

Toad for Oracle Base offers unlimited concurrent connections, allowing you to juggle multiple databases. That means importing from and exporting to other databases open in Toad for Oracle, or comparing prod and dev instances of the same database. You’ll find it much easier to work across multiple databases when you have them open at the same time in Toad.

2: Browsing schema objects

You know the thousands of lines of code required to perform tasks like cloning database objects, creating test data and adding constraints? From the schema browser in Toad for Oracle Freeware you could generate that code, but only one object at a time. With Toad for Oracle Base you can select as many objects as you want and create scripts for all of them at once. That means saving hours of work with a few clicks of the mouse.

The same goes for exporting data definition language (DDL) scripts, which Toad for Oracle Freeware didn’t support. With Toad for Oracle Base, you can generate the thousands (or tens of thousands) of lines of code needed to clone objects to another instance of an Oracle database.

Think of how often you use the Go Back and Go Forward buttons in your web browser. With Toad for Oracle Base, you can navigate your work history like that too, but in Toad for Oracle Freeware all previous entries were greyed out.

3:Automation

Those upgrades in the schema browser are designed for greater productivity. The next step is to automate that productivity.

Many of our commercial users depend on automation, which Toad for Oracle Freeware didn’t include. They use scripts to string together a batch of tasks and then, say, send a finished report to their teammates via email.

Automation Designer in Toad for Oracle Base lets you automate and even schedule jobs on an unlimited number of apps or tasks.

4: Version control support and team coding

Do you nail your SQL queries and PL/SQL code on the first try? Thought not.

Toad for Oracle Freeware set limits on the number of concurrent objects and the number of times you can check them in and out. Fortunately, Toad for Oracle Base doesn’t have those limits, making it much easier to maintain and update your work.

Even if you write perfect code and need to check it in and out only a few times, you’ll want some variety in supported version control systems. Toad for Oracle Freeware was integrated with Subversion and CVS; the commercial version adds the support you’ve requested for repositories like Git, GitHub, Rational, Mercurial, Perforce, Serena PVCS, Visual Studio and Team Foundation.

5: Compare data/schema

How often do you compare tables to identify differences, say, between dev and prod?

Toad for Oracle Freeware didn’t provide for that, but Toad for Oracle Base does, both for the schemas (objects and attributes) and for the data in the table. That’s a big advantage not only for developers but also for DBAs.

6: Import/export data

We’ve found that, no matter the flavor of Toad, the action performed by developers most frequently on a data grid is to export the data or save it as a different target. Toad for Oracle Freeware permitted export only to flat file, but the commercial version allows export to Access, delimited text, HTML tables, JSON, XML and ODBC including SQL Server. You can also export data to a script containing INSERT or MERGE statements.

Suppose you want to export data whenever a given table is updated, so that the data can be used elsewhere. Toad for Oracle Base lets you automate and schedule the periodic export of data in a clean report format. Having the export function easily accessible in the commercial version is a big differentiator.

7: Browse sessions

Finally, Session Browser is a diagnostic tool for your SQL statements. It’s integrated with the commercial version, such that you can view threads from any applications that access the Oracle Database in the same window. In Toad for Oracle Freeware, you were allowed to browse only your Toad.exe session.

With Toad for Oracle Base, you can analyze the effects on database performance of changes you make to your SQL statements for better troubleshooting, without jumping back and forth between tools.

What’s next?

Lock in your promotional price of US$195 by December 31.

Those are seven ways Toad for Oracle Base is better than Toad for Oracle Freeware.

There’s actually an eighth way, too: technical support.

You were on your own with the freely downloadable version, but you get boatloads of tech support with the commercial version. We’ll cover that in the next blog post in this series.

Upgrade to Toad for Oracle Base and leapfrog over the productivity you’ve enjoyed with Toad for Oracle Freeware. It’s our way of sparing you from spending the rest of your days seeing this dialog every time you attempt something ambitious: