Is it by chance that within an interval of a few days both Oracle announced Oracle 12c and Dell Software announced Toad for Oracle v12?
When I first saw Toad 12 (which was the first one), I was wondering about the features. As I generally don’t like reading documents I tried myself and immediately found a new feature named “Jump”. This helps a lot finding useful tools like the various compare options but is able to scan your directories and even the entire internet for additional information. So if you are new to Toad use it to find the tools; if you are an experiences Toad user use it to find additional information.
My main topic was of course checking if Toad is able to handle Oracle Database 12c (12.1.0.1). As a beta tester I had the chance to work with that release already for approximately one year – and was able to use Toad 11.6 with it (with some minor error messages while connecting as a DBA). But what about the new features in 12c?
When connecting first with Toad 12 to Oracle 12c I encountered that there are no more error messages. And opening the Session Browser to wonder: there’s a new tab called “Redaction Policies”. This brand new feature of Oracle 12c made it into the new Toad version.
In this example I wanted to hide the first 12 digits of the credit card number (column KREDITKARTENID) and the entire information about the credit limit (KREDITWUERDIG) if the application (MODULE) is not Toad. – It worked perfect.
Some other 12c features are quite useful and I was wondering why they didn’t exist already for years, like the automatic sequence generation for a table named identity column. And of course in Toad 12, that feature is available as well.
The above image is a nice dropdown box that allows you to select the identity feature, and you can change the values in the second step, as needed. As you can see in this picture the new feature “invisible column” and “Default on Null” are implemented as well.
Maybe you are waiting for Toad support for Pluggable databases. Is there really a need for Toad to have features for PDBs? In principal a PDB should work like an ordinary database. So there, a connect is a connect and adding users, tablespaces or other objects to a PDB is not different from any other database. But in the past I had one favorite tool in Toad the Database Browser! I was using it especially to check the Top Sessions, or datafile I/O, regardless of the database (so you can select multiple databases or all databases of one server to compare or rank the sessions, tablespace usage or datafile IO). Looking at the Database Browser for a 12c Container database I realized the additional tab named “Pluggable DBs”.
So here we go! Pluggable Databases are supported in Toad and you can list the sessions for your CDB and PDBs in one view. But here’s room for improvement. If you look at Datafile I/O, the columns are marked “Database” and “Service”. If you mark both the CDB and the PDBs datafiles are shown twice. It might be better to show the relationship between each other.
If you need more information just let me know and please visit ToadWorld where you probably find some more interesting information as well as several blogs around Toad and Oracle.