A Must-have for DBA's and Developers alike
August 04, 2016
A Must-have for DBA's and Developers alike
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Toad for Oracle
Toad is being used by developers and DBAs across our IT organization. It is used by our team to monitor databases, perform queries, generate DDLs and review performance (wait events), etc. It's also used by other teams to develop applications, run queries, and ad-hoc reports. Further it's used by the migration team to migrate code changes across environments.
- We use it for develop and debug many of our custom and integration applications throughout IT. It has many options to display and export the results. The result was also fast. It doesn't crash easily like Oracle SQL Developer.
- We also use it monitor databases. There are couple of views, such as Session Browser, that we use frequently. But it needs to be customized to display the information we use really want. Once it's set up, we can see all the queries, top events, long ops, block locks on each session, and take action if necessary.
- It's easy to see all objects. There is a function - Schema/Object Comparison - which I like, to compare and a particular list of objects between two similar databases. And it will automatically list all differences and generate a sync script.
- The user interface can be improved. As a DBA, there are times we need to have different sessions open to different databases. And if we open an Editor, and Schema Browser for each database, it becomes very confusing after a while to see which window is for what database. I think the problem is with the tabbed interface. Their dual tabbed interface can definitely be improved to streamline things to ensure which window is for what database.
- The Session Browser can be improved. Out-of-the-box views have too many columns hidden, and apply some default "group by" columns which I don't find useful. It's hard to set up the view to see exactly the way you wanted. I think color coding the sessions between Active/Inactive/Killed (similar to the view in DBArtisan) will be helpful.
- The default interface is too cluttered, too busy. I don't need/use nearly half of those buttons, and I would imagine most people don't need those buttons either. Again, I have to do some customization to hide those things to make it the way I wanted to be. I wish there was an easier way, for example, just show the buttons relevant to a developer, or DBA, but not both.
- Toad has apositive ROI on our business. We get a volume license, and many people in our IT organization use it and find it to be critical in their everyday job.
- We license other products from Dell/Quest Software, and so Toad is a natural choice for our development and database work.
DBArtisan has an easier to understand interface. It may not have all the features that Toad has. However, those differences are small and shouldn't impact the work or productivity of average DBA work.
SQL Developer is also good and free from Oracle. But it's entirely Java-based, so it's slow and prone to crash. However, for a small development projects, this is perfect. SQL Developer also has third party plug-ins so that you can connect to SQL Server and Sybase to pull data into Oracle.
SQL Developer is also good and free from Oracle. But it's entirely Java-based, so it's slow and prone to crash. However, for a small development projects, this is perfect. SQL Developer also has third party plug-ins so that you can connect to SQL Server and Sybase to pull data into Oracle.