How This Book Is Organized

This book doesn't make assumptions about prior TOAD or Oracle development background and therefore all the tips and techniques are presented. The main focus of this book is to illustrate using TOAD and to be a handy reference for anyone using the TOAD tool. This book is liberally illustrated with working examples of all the topics. The chapters are organized as follows :

Chapter 1, "Setting Up TOAD for Successful Use," discusses the various installation options for most any computing environment. This chapter begins with basic operational issues, such as TOAD's database connectivity requirements, Oracle-based security, and required schema objects. The chapter then delves into more advanced TOAD security settings, including various read-only mode options available. It concludes with Windows scripts for saving and restoring your various TOAD settings.

Chapter 2, "Using TOAD's Schema Browser," covers the main TOAD interface for exploring your databases' structure and content (that is, metadata and data). This chapter also introduces you to the various keystrokes available in this browser. This chapter also includes how to model your schema to visualize or print the various object relationships. This chapter covers all the browser's advanced display options and capabilities, as well as various key startup and control options. This chapter also includes how to filter the schemas, objects, and their data. In addition, this chapter introduces the use of the Favorites tab for a customized browser experience.

Chapter 3, "TOAD SQL Editor," covers all the features available for building and maintaining SQL code and SQL scripts. This chapter covers all of the shortcuts and hotkeys available in depth and in a convenient reference grid. This chapter includes how to build SQL with code templates and advanced topics like "scripts that write scripts."

Chapter 4, "TOAD Procedure Editor," covers all the features available for building and maintaining PL/SQL, procedures, functions, and triggers. This chapter will also illustrate just how easy it is to see the various object relationships. This chapter also covers using the powerful PL/SQL symbolic debugger! This chapter covers all of the shortcuts and hotkeys available in depth and in a convenient reference grid.

The book then turns its focus to database administration.

Chapter 5, "Using TOAD for Routine DBA Tasks," covers the routine DBA tasks such as instance status, monitoring of key database elements and user sessions, checking and correcting fragmentation, and the easy creation and maintenance of database objects. Anyone who has to do database administration (possibly even the power user ) will find this chapter useful.

Chapter 6, "Using TOAD for Non-Routine DBA Tasks," covers the rest of the database administration story. This chapter illustrates how TOAD can do even complex DBA tasks such as creating new databases, estimating object sizes, creating schema scripts, additional monitoring, and even the management of INIT.ORA parameters, rollback segments, and redo logs.

The remainder of the book covers various TOAD topics not previously discussed.

Chapter 7, "Generating Database Reports via TOAD," covers the various reports that come with TOAD, including HTML reports, and covers how to generate additional reports .

Chapter 8, "Exporting Table Data," illustrates how easy it is to get data out of Oracle into a variety of customized formats using TOAD. This chapter also discusses how TOAD easily works with existing Oracle features such as Export and Import.

Chapter 9, "Using Other Powerful TOAD Tools," covers the remaining features of TOAD. These features include browsing master-detail data; building SQL visually using the SQL Modeler; creating "poor man's" mini-ERDs via the Schema Browser hook to the SQL modeler; registering external programs for quick launch from within TOAD; visually comparing text files for differences; running network utilities such as FTP, telnet, and rexec ; maintaining tnsnames files; running TKPROF; making subsets of data; and managing libraries of scripts via TOAD's script manager.

Chapter 10, "Knowing the TOAD World and Its Add-ons," covers the various TOAD prepackaged options currently available (that is, freeware, standard, professional, expert) as separately purchasable options, plus additional features or interfacing products available from Quest Software, Inc. Tools covered include Knowledge Xperts for PL/SQL and Oracle Administration, SQLab Xpert (SQL tuning), Benchmark Factory (stress testing), and QDesigner (data modeling).