Item: Toad Database Developer Tools
Rating: 9
Author: Sunder Lal

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Toad is being used in my whole organization for daily Database activities and module development like Packages, Procedures, Table creation, Triggers, Functions and more. It helps us in developing SQL scripts and managing our organization's database.
The business problems which we solve using Toad are Data cleanup, everyday monitoring the database and doing modifications in the database, if needed.

Pros and Cons

It provides excellent platform for writing database queries and executing them and at the same time managing the complete database. It is beneficial for everyone from DBA to SQL developers.
Its main strengths include in the functionalities such as Script execution, Generating ER diagrams, Evaluating Queries and Query plans, Generating Schema Doc, Importing & Exporting results of queries and Reverse Engineering.
It has the capability to show the statistics related to time taken by a query to execute completely and finally how many records have been retrieved from that query.
It allows me to view different type of packages present inside any database scheme easily and then allowing export of queries into csv or excel files.

Since it doesn't offer a very large buffer size, it will not be beneficial when you need to retrieve millions of rows from a query. So, it is not beneficial for executing very large queries.
It has a slow performance when you execute a query which will retrieve large number of rows and thus you could only process a fixed amount of information at a particular time using Toad.
It doesn't provide any script history to view your previous queries which you have executed in Toad. I would like this feature to be added in Toad.

Return on Investment

Toad has been primary database management tool and it proves out to be beneficial for us from the Day 1 of its usage in terms of productivity as well as business opportunities.

Alternatives Considered

SQL Developer

SQL Developer is very slow when connected to more than 2 database instances at the same time.

Other Software Used

AT&T Connect, SAP CRM, Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, Lithium Social Web

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say Toad is an excellent database management tool for analyzing and maintaining the database of an organization. It can be termed as the first preferred choice as the Query Builder providing graphical representation for your queries. It is well suited for companies that don't have a very large database, i.e approximately not more than 1 million records are processed every day.

Excellent tool for managing your database

Overall Satisfaction with Toad for Oracle