Getting started With Toad for Oracle - in-depth tutorial

Hello, and welcome to Toad for Oracle. In this short video I'll help you get started with Toad for Oracle. And I'll be going through the basic features and functions of the product. There are two other videos which accompany this one, both of which are more advanced, one for developers and one for DBAs. So when you finish watching this, one please choose one or both of those to follow up with. So first I'm going to show you how to log onto the Oracle server using Toad. Then I'll go through some of the key features and functions, some of the main windows, such the Schema Browser and the Editor. I'll show you how to configure Toad by selecting the most appropriate options for you, as well as how to customize the user interface so you can change the look and feel. I'll then show you about the different editions that are available with Toad, so that will help you identify which of the editions that suit the role that you're in. And then I'll close out with where you can find more information about Toad for Oracle, both inside of Toad and outside. So let's first of all move into Toad. This is the Toad for Oracle Interface. At the moment, everything is blank. Because I've yet to log onto a server. And you see here the main menu and the toolbar, with a number of buttons and various slide-out windows, which I'll talk about later on. So let's first make a connection to the server. I'm going to push the Connection button first of all. This is how to make a connection, and open the Connection window. I'll select a user name and password to enter. And I'm using a direct connection. There are a number of different ways in which you can connect to the server. You can either select a TNS ORA file, we can use a direct connection, or we can use the LDAP interface. With a direct connection, you need to put a host name, and a port number, and a service name. And you can also specify a color that you want to associate with this connection. That helps you differentiate the different windows that you might have open in Toad from one another, particularly if you're connecting to production databases. If you're making a connection to a production database, then you can ensure that you don't accidentally change anything on that database by setting your session to read-only. If you want to make a change on that session, then you would have to disconnect and reconnect with that unchecked. So let's go ahead and make a connection. And you see that the first window that opens in my case is the Schema Browser. In your case, you might find a different window open. By default, in fact, it's the Editor window. And I'll talk about how you can change that startup window when I talk about the options. OK. So first of all, the Schema Browser. The Schema Browser has a number of different ways that it can present object information to you. The one I've chosen is a multi-tabbed arrangement. If I use this option over here, I can change the style, the left-hand style to a dropdown list, a tab single row, or a tree view. If I select Treeview just to see what it looks like, you can see that this might be more helpful for you if you prefer this type of view. All the objects are in separate nodes. And I can expand each node and view the objects. For objects that belong in a different schema, then I have another schema's node, which I can expand out. If I revert back to my original where I have tabs, I can change the schema using this dropdown. I'll select a different schema from which I want to view objects. So I have these primary tabs on the left-hand side, which are my object types. And for each object type, there is associated secondary tabs on the right-hand side, which give me attributes for each of the associated objects. So if I clicked an employee table, you'll see the columns of the table, and the indexes I have in the table, any constraints related to that table, data, partitions, referential integrity associated with the table, policies, auditing, et cetera. Data is quite a popular one, as is script. Script is the DDL script that was used to create that object. So I can create objects similar to that or make some changes, as well as data clearly. So let's select the Department Table, and have a look at some of the options that are available with the data grid. So click the Department Table, click the Data tab. And the first thing I want to do is turn off any columns I don't want to see. So if I select this little box in the top left column of the grid, I can turn off any columns that I don't want to see, such as the row ID. Another way to do that is to simply grab the column header, and just pull it away. So it removes itself like so. So I'm left with the columns I want to see. Then I want to have a look at some of the salaries here. And I want to calculate some of the average values and totals and that sort of thing. So I'll select a range of salaries. so I'll just select a group like this. And then use this Sum button. It has a Sum, Average, Count, Min and Max. And if I click all of them, you can see the values displayed at the bottom. I can move columns around. I could drop this column here to here, and move it across to the left till the arrows lights up, let go. And then I've moved that column to the left. And all this