Toad is a de-facto database development tool, but a bit much for just analytics
September 12, 2018
Toad is a de-facto database development tool, but a bit much for just analytics
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Toad for Oracle
As a non-profit healthcare system consisting of hospitals and clinics, we run an electronic health record system to capture patient data and clinical workflow logs and store them into an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The EDW is being used as a data source to pursue for clinical research and data driven quality improvement and clinical workflow optimization. Toad has been used as a database tool for our EDW team, by data developers who create data marts and ETL processes, and data analysts who extract KPIs from clinical data in the EDW.
Pros
- Toad is a de-facto standard tool for data developers and analysts. Generally speaking it provides almost every function needed to manage data in EDW with great performance and stability.
- The nature of clinical data is big-sized: one table may have billions of rows. Toad provides critical functions to manage SQLs, e.g. Top SQL that can monitor and manage SQLs using CPU power and network bandwidth, so that EDW administrator can optimize ETL operations in the best efficiency.
- Many of our data analysts are not computer science backgrounded (having clinical / nursing background). Toad provides great auditing tools such as Tuning Lab or SQL Scanner, so that data analysts can train themselves with guidance of the tool.
Cons
- It is an expensive tool, compared to SQL Developer or Orange. It is worth its price, but for developers or analysts who need basic functions, other tools are good enough.
- It is a heavy tool. It consumes a lot of resources especially when it runs in laptop. If hardware is not good enough and runs big query on top of that, Toad sometimes crashes.
- Look and feel of ER diagram should be improved. We had need of printing it out and put on the wall and it wasn't so beautiful.
- Toad is a great tool and good thing is developers are already familiar with it. There are strong online user communities and our developers learned from them or each other. There may not need additional training for Toad for our developers.
- Database guys have their own preferences of tools. Toad is an expensive tool and everyone doesn't have to buy it, if there are alternatives.
- We started pulling unstructured and big data in our Oracle based EDW. Toad may need additional features to be integrated with advanced analytics: machine learning tools (e.g. R) or data pipelining tools (e.g. Alteryx)
We didn't make a decision of choosing one and dropping the other. Our database guys have their own preference of tools. Since SQL Developer is a free-to-use tool and light weighted tool, we used it for education materials. For those who need advanced functions, database administrators for example, we bought an enterprise license of Toad and distributed them to developers. For enterprise level of analytics running Oracle based databases, I believe SQL Developer and Toad are two basics and safe choice to start with, unless one has very particular need (or preference).
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