Getting started with Toad for DB2: Chapter 4 - Database Explorer Features

And we'll talk about some of the things that you see now with Toad for DB2. So this is the database Explorer window. And on the left hand side, it lists all the objects. And since I chose dropdown as my way of displaying these objects, if I wanted to choose a different object type, I would just select those from a dropdown list. So if I wanted to display my aliases, I would select Aliases. If I wanted to select Indexes, it would display my indexes. But I'm going to go back to tables now. So that is the dropdown list. And so when you select an object in the Database Explorer, on the right hand side, you'll see that there's a bunch of information organized in tabs on the right-hand side. So you select an object in the left-hand side. Right-hand side shows tabs. You could go down these tabs. For example, you can see the columns and their attributes in the table. You can see a sampling of data that's in that table. You can see properties from the DB2 catalog, statistics. If there's indexes defined on this table, you will see those, the definitions of those indexes, and et cetera. It goes on and on, ending with a grants tab. If there's been any explicit grants performed on this table, you'll see that information here. And then a script tab, which will give you the DDL that has been used to generate that table, any type of grant, explicit grant, statements and any type of constraint such as primary key and foreign key information. So that's virtually what you're going to see on any type of object. So this is the table. I'm to go back to Indexes now. So for, indexes, for example, the right-hand side changes a little bit because there's a little bit different information for indexes versus tables. But indexes have columns. It's got properties, statistics, dependencies. All of our objects have a dependencies tab where you can see one-level related objects. So you can see what table space and what table the index is dependent on and, again, the script tab. So you'll see this for all of our objects. Now, getting back to the Database Explorer, I'm going to go back to Tables and show you that it's highly customizable. So I chose dropdown as my method of displaying information. You can choose tabbed if you so wish, which is going to give you a tab view. So it's going to categorize all your objects. And you're going to have to jump to a specific tab. So if I wanted to see indexes, I would just go to the Index tab. We have eight multi-line tab view which is going to allow you to see all the different object types and just very easily navigate and jump to those directly. You don't have to scroll through a left to right tab scroll mechanism to do that. Another view would be a tree list view in which we display in hierarchical order a list of objects. So you can see, under a particular schema, we list that schema's tables and other schema information such as indexes, constraints, functions, et cetera. All those are listed and grouped by schema. So there's many different ways you could view things. Again, I like the dropdown view because I am a big fan of being able to just very quickly jump to specific things within Toad.