Getting started with Toad for DB2: Chapter 5 - Database Explorer Filtering

Now with the Database Explorer in Toad for DB2, there's some filtering mechanisms. The first thing you'll notice is that the top level control lists the schema. So in this instance, I'm on table, so I'm displaying all the tables for the administrator schema. If I change that to another schema, say stage, this is going to show me all the tables that are qualified with the creator or schema of stage. I'm going to jump back to administrator. And, again, this is the entire list of tables. And it could be a very large list, so we give you ways to filter on their name. If I wanted to, for example, to see all the names that contain emp, for like employee tables, I could just type in emp and hit Enter. And this is going to show you the tables that have a lower case emp name of them. If I wanted uppercase, I could just type in uppercase EMP, and you can see this will list all the tables that have uppercase EMP in their name. So it's a pretty nice and quick way of allowing you to filter. Now we also provide advanced filtering as well. So if you click on this button, it will bring up a filtering dialog that allows you to create pretty complex filters on things such as maybe which tablespace because you only want to show tables in a certain tablespace or that have been created after a certain time. And we have certain search criteria. So not only can you say like, the string, if you enter a string for their name, it could be used in a starts with, ends with, like clause, equals. So there's many different search criteria or search conditioning that can be specified to allow this filtering to be very, very strong filtering. And that stays per schema. So if I jump back to the stage schema, you'll see that it is not filtered. Right now there is no filter, but if I jump back to administrator. So schemas are pretty much defined and kept in Toad by schemas. So it's a pretty cool thing as well by schema and type. So if I jumped to indexes, you'll see that there is no filter on my indexes. Now as you saw before when I was typing in upper and lower case, it was matching only in upper and lower case. So if I type in a lower case emp, this list is matching it only on the lower case. There's an option that we've introduced to Toad that to ignore that case, and I'll show you that right now. So this is another filter enhancement. So if you go to Tools, Options. There's many options, but the one I'm talking about right now is "do not use case sensitive filtering". So if I click OK, I come back here. I enter uppercase EMP, you'll see that now in uppercase EMP and a lowercase emp now match both upper and lower case. So you don't have to worry about typing in the correct case here. Our filters will work, and you should be very satisfied with how our filtering works in that manner.