Five Ways Toad Xpert Edition Can Help You Write Better Code

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1 Five Ways Toad Xpert Edition Can Help You Write Better Code Written by Brad Wulf Product Manager, Dell Software Abstract For many years, Toad for Oracle Base Edition has provided a firm and reliable foundation for general database development tasks. However, as the role of the database professional has evolved to require more sophisticated processes and higher code quality standards, many organizations have upgraded to Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition for the additional functionality it provides particularly, its support for developers in the areas of speed, code quality, integration, testing and change management. In this brief, we ll explore five ways Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition can help you write better code. But you don t have to take our word for it Dell makes it easy for your entire organization to evaluate our solution with a free 30-day trial. See for yourself how Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition provides the advanced database tooling you need today. Introduction It is no longer enough for database developers to provide syntactically correct code; today, the expectation is that code also be semantically correct, optimized and enterprise-grade. Therefore, organizations require a more holistic approach to database development. Over the years, database professionals have made Toad for Oracle Base edition the de facto standard tool for database development work. However, to help database professionals with today s challenges, Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition offers advanced functionality to support emerging trends throughout the database world.

2 Toad for Oracle s built-in Auto Optimize feature enables quick rewrites of code. This document explains five ways Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition can help you write better code. You ll be able to: Quickly write more efficient code and reduce the overhead associated with long-running or inefficient queries Analyze and report on the semantic correctness (not just syntactic correctness) of code, and ensure deployment of compliant code across all applications Easily integrate database changes using your existing version control processes, such as SVN or TFS 2012 Automatically generate real-world test data if none is available or if production data contains sensitive information Ensure that database changes are accurately, seamlessly and completely migrated from development (DEV) to testing (TEST) to production (PROD) Reason #1. Write more efficient code quickly and easily. To ensure that you can deliver syntactically correct and optimized code, Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition includes integrated SQL and PL/SQL performance tuning. Tuning is accessible in two ways: Auto Optimize Quick and simple single-statement optimization within the Toad Editor SQL Optimizer for Oracle Finegrained and broader support for code performance enhancements such as index recommendations and SQL rewrites Auto Optimize For the database developer, Toad for Oracle s built-in Auto Optimize feature enables quick rewrites of code (see Figure 1). You can refactor and rewrite statements, as well as choose from alternatives suggested by Toad that are optimized for environment-specific requirements such as online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehouses or mixed database environments. And you can do all of this without ever leaving the Toad for Oracle interface. SQL Optimizer for Oracle For DBAs who require more finegrained and broader support for code performance enhancements such as index recommendations and SQL rewrites, Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition Figure 1. Developers can optimize statements quickly and easily using Toad s Auto Optimize feature. 2

3 Figure 2. SQL Optimizer identifies the SQL statements most likely to benefit from tuning and automatically recommends the best rewrites. includes SQL Optimizer for Oracle. SQL Optimizer reduces query times for both: New code Developers can use SQL Optimizer to optimize code prior to its promotion from DEV to TEST and PROD. Existing code For DBAs with a large body of legacy code, the spectre of optimizing all of it can be daunting. But SQL Optimizer makes it easy: Simply select existing procedural code in bulk, and SQL Optimizer will identify the SQL statements most likely to benefit from tuning and automatically recommend the best rewrites for each to reduce the elapsed run time (see Figure 2). Reason #2. Ensure code quality. Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition also provides two interfaces for code validation: Toad Editor For real-time validation Code Analysis For review and management reporting across the entire project Using the Editor The Editor notifies users of semantic code violations in real time, which ensures that all code checked into version control or promoted to production conforms to enterprise standards for program structure, efficiency, readability, maintainability and code correctness. (see Figure 3). The Toad Editor notifies users of semantic code violations in real time. Figure 3. The Toad Editor validates code against enterprise standards for code quality and semantic correctness in real time. 3

4 Code Analysis helps developers measure the correctness of their code against enterprise standards, ensuring consistency and facilitating easier refactoring. Figure 4. Code Analysis enables you to validate code in bulk against enterprise standards for code quality and semantic correctness. Using Code Analysis By launching the Code Analysis interface, you get a more detailed view of the same information, as well as additional metrics measuring the overall quality of your code. In addition, you can perform code quality checks against multiple statements and objects in a single step, as well as generate HTML reports detailing the results to share with other stakeholders (see Figure 4). Code Analysis also helps ensure that true enterprise-level code quality standards are met by all users. Users can modify or create their own code quality standards templates, categorize those templates into manageable subsets, and share them with teams across the entire organization. Code Analysis provides objective measures of code quality, including Complexity, Toad Code Rating, Halstead Volume and McCabe s Cyclomatic, which can be used to determine which code might most benefit from optimization with SQL Optimizer. Integrated features like this help ensure that your code base is consistent, easy to manage and easy to refactor throughout its lifecycle. Reason #3. Manage code changes effectively. For years database developers lagged their application development counterparts in the area of source code control. All Toad for Oracle editions include a source control feature called Team Coding, which helps database development teams leverage investments in existing version control tools (Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Subversion and Perforce). But with Xpert Edition, you can combine Team Coding with Code Analysis to enforce code quality policies when developers check in their code a critical step in helping database developers manage their code changes with confidence and consistency. Many database developers today are asked to leverage existing investments in version control software by ensuring that code changes are driven through providers such as TFS, SVN and Perforce. And they must also ensure that all code conforms to a set of enterprise standards governing quality and formatting. Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition meets both of these requirements. For the former, Toad can seamlessly integrate with your 4

5 Figure 5. Toad can automatically generate a Code Analysis report as part of check-in of version-controlled objects, ensuring that only validated code is added to your project. organization s preferred version control tool by virtue of context-sensitive menu options in multiple locations within the tool most notably the option to check in/check out on the Object Explorer. In addition, the Team Coding view provides additional insight into controlled objects, including history, as well as comparison of local and previous file versions. For the latter requirement, you can configure the Team Coding feature to automatically perform a chosen set of Code Analysis validations on each object when it is checked into your version control system, thereby automating what might otherwise be a laborintensive and easily forgotten task. Reason #4. Quickly create valid test data. Developers creating new code often have difficulty testing it, usually because the new objects do not yet have data associated with them. Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition s Data Generation feature solves this problem by populating empty tables with actual data that is representative of the data types defined within the schema objects (see Figure 6). In other cases, there is already data in the tables, but it is sensitive production data that cannot securely be used in development or testing environments. You can use the Data Generation feature to overwrite the sensitive data with test data that is appropriate in size and type, thereby enabling effective testing without compromising security. Enforcing referential integrity The Data Generation feature of Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition also provides support for generating test data that can be joined across related tables. This is valuable when data in parent and child tables must conform to referential integrity constraints so that users might write test queries to confirm that datasets are related and can be joined. For example, when you generate data for related Customer and Order tables, if You can configure Toad Team Coding to automatically perform Code Analysis validations on each object when it is checked into your version control system. 5

6 Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition can enforce referential integrity, so the test data it generates can be joined across related tables. Figure 6. Toad generates data using real-world templates, so the data is appropriate given the field name (such as US Address) and context. you do not account for enforcement of referential integrity, you will be unable to return datasets when writing test queries against the tables because none of the data matches. By choosing the Enforce Referential Integrity option when using Data Generation, you can ensure data consistency, and you also get finegrained control over the type and range of the generated data values. In the example shown in Figure 7, the CUST_ID fields for the parent and child tables have matching data (rather than disparate, unrelated values), so they can be joined during testing. Figure 7. You can use Data Generation s Enforce Referential Integrity option when populating child tables with data from a parent table. 6

7 Figure 8. The Master Detail Browser in the Schema Browser lets you quickly confirm that data generated in a parent table also has corresponding data in the child table. This screenshot highlights a particular customer ID value in the parent table and the corresponding value in the child table. You can easily and visually confirm that generated data is truly correct and related by using the Master Detail Browser in the Toad Schema Browser to ensure that each generated record in the parent table has a corresponding record in the child table (see Figure 8). Creating enterprise-size test datasets If you need to generate large, enterprisesize test datasets, you can create serverside objects to handle data generation operations on a more capable server, rather than on your desktop. Reason #5. Automatically generate sync scripts and report on schema changes. Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition enables you to automatically generate sync scripts and reports detailing schema changes detected between environments, either manually or via the automation interface. This is extremely valuable because it enables you to confirm that expected schema changes are being migrated from DEV to TEST to PROD, as well as ensure that unexpected changes are identified and reconciled as quickly and seamlessly as possible. In addition, the Schema Compare feature allows you to create metadata snapshots during comparisons to help you track changes within a single environment. For example, using a snapshot, you can run a schema comparison job that will easily and quickly compare the current state of a database to an archived snapshot of the same database from yesterday or a month ago, thus ensuring consistency within as well as between database environments. Many-to-many schema compare You can also compare schema-level objects in multiple schemas across two databases in a single action using the Multi Schema Compare function (manyto-many schema comparisons), as shown in Figure 9. This can be extremely valuable. For example, suppose you must compare multiple PROD schemas to multiple TEST schemas in a single operation. Without Multi Schema Compare, if there were 50 individual TEST schemas, you would have to run 50 unique PROD to TEST comparison jobs. However, with Multi Schema Compare, you can configure a single You can compare schema-level objects in multiple schemas across two databases in a single action using Multi Schema Compare. 7

8 Try Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition free for 30 days. Figure 9. Using the Compare Multiple Schemas feature, you can efficiently compare multiple schemas on one database with matching multiple schemas on another, instead of having to configure multiple separate comparisons. job to perform the 1-to-50 schema comparison operation in one fell swoop, saving you significant time. Version control of schema snapshots You can add any schema snapshots to your organization s version control process. This makes state information easy to diagnose you can simply pull schema changes for any period from version control to assess changes over time and even roll them back if necessary. Conclusion Today, a successful development team must do far more than produce syntactically correct code. Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition delivers the advanced functionality your organization needs, enabling you to: Reduce the overhead associated with long-running or inefficient queries (Auto Optimize and SQL Optimizer). Ensure consistent, enterprise-ready code (Code Analysis). Manage code effectively using your existing version control repository (Team Coding). Protect sensitive data and generate real-world data for testing purposes (Data Generation). Ensure that all environments are synchronized and changes flow seamlessly and completely from DEV to TEST to PROD environments (Schema Compare). To learn more about Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition and download your free 30-day trial, please visit software.dell. com/products/toad-for-oracle/xpertedition.aspx. 8

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