Overview of key DBA features in Toad for DB2 zOS Part II

Toad for DB2 has features that allow you to very easily modify your database objects. So if you want to modify or alter the definition of an object, you can select that object and click Alter. In this case, I right clicked on a table and selected Alter Table. So the Alter Table dialog will come up and it will allow me to modify the attributes or columns of this object. So for example, if I wanted to add a new column I could very easily do that. So I want to add that and click Show Script. Toad will identify that the modification could be done with a native alter. So it will generate an alter table and column script here. So there's a generated script since it was-- I had the column at the end of the table. I just created a native alter. We'll call it native because it can be done via an alter statement. But what if I wanted to modify the structure of the table? And basically now I want that new column to be the first column of the table. Like a generator script again. And since Toad is going to realize that I can't do that natively it's going to generate a script, which we call an extended alter, that is basically going to save off the data in the table, drop and recreate all the objects that are dependent on a table, and then recreate the table with the new column, and then recreate all the dependent objects. So it gets a little bit more complex to do that. And Toad acknowledges that if it can do native alters it will generate scripts to do native alters, otherwise it will do an extended alter you drop and create. And what we have for tables, we have this Impacted Objects tab. So instead of having you to go through the whole script, you'll be able to easily identify from this control what objects will be recreated due to the modifications that you're making. Another thing that we have is we have several different data preservation options. You can see that the generated script here is using a temporary tables to store off data. It's basically going to insert the data from the real table, this temporary table, and then drop and recreate the table, and then restore those values. But there is another option in which you could use data utilities to do that. And when you generate a script when that is present, Toad is actually going to create a script that has utility statements, such as unload. So we're saving the data from your current definition in the unload statement. Dropping and recreating the object. And then actually going down and using a load statement to load the data back in the new defined table. So that is the table alterations. Again, Toad is smart enough to do an extended alter when it needs to and only when it needs to. Otherwise it will generate a native alter.