Toad World Pipeline

August 2008 Issue

PIPELINE is the monthly newsletter of Toad World - your trusted source for Toad and database knowledge for Oracle, DB2 and MySQL professionals.

Upcoming Events

Gain valuable insight through webcasts, seminars, trade shows and user group meetings held around the world.

Sept 21-25, U.S.
Oracle Open World
Oct 21-22, U.S.
Speak-Tech: Best of Oracle PL/SQL Seminar
Oct 29-30, U.S.
Oracle PL/SQL Programming 2008 Conference

Click here for a full list of worldwide events

Discovering the Hidden Treasures of Toad®

Quest has been selling Toad® for about 10 years now. As we travel the world attending user group events and trade shows, we are frequently approached by customers with suggestions for new Toad functionality. In most cases, we are able to show them that the functionality they are suggesting already exists within Toad. Then they exclaim, "Wow! I didn't know Toad could do that!"

This year, we have been using our public appearances to showcase the "hidden treasures" of Toad. We also recently built a presentation and a set of coffee break bytes for Toad World. The content, called "Discover the Hidden Treasures of Toad," highlights some of the most useful, productivity-enhancing functionality you may not know about. We cover topics like SQL optimization, project management, Toad Action Recall and more. >Access: Discover the Hidden Treasures of Toad

Oracle: Back Up and Recover

by Sushma Jagannath

A sound database backup and recovery plan is crucial to protecting data in the event of media loss and physical corruption on production storage systems. Oracle backup and recovery technologies enable data to be recovered from media loss and corruption, as well as from logical errors at the row, table, and database level. This article discusses some of the new backup and recovery features in Oracle Database 11g that improve the manageability of Oracle Database backup and recovery. It also presents sample questions of the type you may encounter when taking the Oracle Database 11g: New Features for Administrators exam, which enables Oracle Certified Professionals (OCPs) certified on Oracle Database 10g to upgrade their certifications to Oracle Database 11g. >Read full article

DB2: Don't Be Memory Misers

by Robert Catterall

When I first started working with DB2 on the mainframe platform, back in the mid-1980s, plenty of people were still running a version of the operating system called MVS/370. That OS limited the size of an address space to 16 MB, and the amount that a subsystem such as DB2 actually had to work with was less than that, since some megabytes were occupied by system code and by common storage areas (i.e., areas of virtual storage that were shared across address spaces). Since server memory was tight, people were frugal in their use of it. Early on, it was common to find organizations running DB2 in production with a total buffer pool configuration of 1000 4K buffers (4 MB of virtual storage) — often allocated to a single pool, BP0. >Read full article

Java: Continuous Performance Management in Eclipse

by Steven Haines

The best way to avoid performance problems in Java applications is to adopt formal performance testing strategies. This paper presents an overview of CPM and its test-driven development with continuous integration heritage. It then goes on to outline the steps a developer should take from within the context of the Eclipse Java IDE to automatically profile all test cases and analyze the results before checking code into a source code repository. While developing an application, the most advanced performance testing strategy available is Continuous Performance Management (CPM). CPM emphasizes automated performance testing of all test cases every time a developer checks code into a source code repository. >Read full article

Software Development Tips & Techniques: Create a Testing Plan for your Project

by Tom Mochal

A Testing Plan is used to describe your specific approach and the details regarding the testing of your solution. There are literally dozens of tests that can be performed on a project. If you have a large, complex project, you may need to use quite a few of the tests. However, all of the tests will not be applicable to all projects. The Testing Plan is where you define the types of tests that will be performed, what the test scenarios look like, what the expected results are, how you will track errors, who will test, where will the testing will take place, etc. >Read full article

Test Your PL/SQL Knowledge

So many implicit cursors, so little time!!
Oracle supports both implicit and explicit cursors in the PL/SQL language. Which of the following fragments of PL/SQL code does not contain an implicit cursor?

A.
BEGIN
   UPDATE preferences
      SET ice_cream_flavor = 'CHOCOLATE'
    WHERE name = 'STEVEN';

B.
DECLARE
   CURSOR around_the_house_jobs_cur
   IS
       SELECT job, frequencey
         FROM adolescent_workload
        WHERE name = 'ELI';

C.
DECLARE
   next_key employee.employee_id%TYPE;
BEGIN
   SELECT employee_seq.NEXTVAL
     INTO next_key
     FROM dual;

D.
FORALL indx IN my_collection.FIRST .. my_collection.LAST
   DELETE FROM employees
    WHERE employee_id = my_collection(indx);

Please send your responses along with your name, city and country, to Puzzler@toadworld.com by August 20, 2008. We will randomly select four winners who submit the correct answer, and each winner will receive a Toad World t-shirt!

July's Puzzler Answer:

(a) The BULK COLLECT query will not raise NO_DATA_FOUND. Instead, it will return an empty collection. Both FIRST and LAST will therefore return NULL and the FOR loop will raise VALUE_ERROR. Since you also declare your own exception with that name, however, the exception section will not trap the error and it goes unhandled.

Winners:

Jimmy Brock from California, USA
Juanjo Fuchsc
Joetta Mark from Missouri, USA
Andre Meier from Leipzig, Germany

Click here to review July's puzzler.

Do you have a paper or article that you'd like to share? Maybe a favorite utility or snippet of code? Have you found an ingenious way to use a feature in Toad? Send them to us at Feedback@toadworld.com.

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