Changes to the connection manager in Toad for DB2

Hi. I'm Steve Hilker, Product Manager for Toad for DB2. In this short video, I'll be showing a few changes to the connection manager and how Toad now will work with your default DB2 client. Using the default client eliminates the need to migrate the DB2 catalog to a Toad-specific DB2 catalog. This streamlines and simplifies the installation process. Toad for DB2 Version 6 will work with DB2 clients 9.7.x through 10.5.x. I have Toad started for the first time after being installed. Here we can see Toad will inform us that it's found and is using our default DB2 client. We click OK, and Toad finishes starting up. Next, Toad will notify us that it doesn't have any connections to find and ask if we want to auto-create connection profiles. If we click this checkbox, Toad will create the connections in a hierarchical host instance layout. If you don't check this box, you can convert to this layout after Toad creates the connections. I'll show you how to do that in a second. So we click OK. And we can see that in my case, Toad has created 22 new DB2 connections. And when we open the connection manager, we can see all of those connections defined. To change the list of the hierarchical format that I mentioned before, we can click on this icon. The warning message says that you can't undo your changes, and that's true if you've customized your list with groups. At this point, you've simply got a flat list and you can easily switch between flat or host instance view. So we'll click OK. And we can now see our connection list in the host instance view. If, however, we want to switch back, we can simply click on this icon. Again, you can ignore the warning message at this point. And we can go back to the flat view. Previously, I mentioned the concept of connection groups. Groups are a great way to organize your connections by location or purpose. For example, I can create a group for my development stage or production connections. And then it's just a simple matter of identifying the various connections and dragging them into their appropriate groups. Another handy Toad feature is the ability to color code your connections. This allows you to have a visual indicator when you're working with the various Toad features and helps you avoid costly mistakes by querying or updating a production resource when you thought you were connected to your test instance. To do this, simply right-click on the connection that you want to color code, come down to Category and pick the appropriate connection type or you can even define your own new category. And then you see a color-coded icon next to the instance name. This covers our session on Toad's connection manager. If you have questions, please post them to our forum on ToadWorld. Thank you.