Quest Software has released version 11.5 of its Toad for Oracle software, the flagship product in the Toad portfolio of productivity software for database developers, DBAs, and analysts. Drawing on community feedback from their two million users, Quest has introduced a number of new features and improvements, most notably a new social intelligence component. Toad for Oracle 11.5, Quest contends, will allow users to take advantage of the best ideas and practices from the community and further increase user productivity.
"The secret to success for Toad has always been the fact that we're so community-built and driven by our millions of users," says John Whittaker, senior manager of product marketing for database management at Quest. With Toad for Oracle 11.5, Quest has implemented social intelligence into the tool itself. "The major enhancement is our integration with the social aspect so that users of Toad will be able to fully leverage the best ideas, practices, and methodology to become more productive than they ever were before," Whittaker tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Many of the updates to Toad for Oracle 11.5 are based on user feedback from the Toad Idea Pond, a forum in which ideas are submitted and voted on by the Toad user community for inclusion in future releases of the tool. This release includes an enhanced query builder, workspace management, greater control of Toad Editor tabs, and enhanced code completion.
Toad for Oracle 11.5 also integrates with Project Lucy and Toad World.
Project Lucy is an online analytical resource for DBAs that offers insight on system and data performance. Project Lucy enables DBAs to upload, analyze, and compare their performance metrics with the community, helping them determine what is (and isn't) the norm based on the experiences of their peers working in similar environments. Toad connects directly to this "collective intelligence" feature, to deliver global statistics in real-time and continuous, ongoing analysis and reporting on existing data.
Toad World is an online resource for education, expertise and collaboration, where database professionals can access free resources on development and administration best practices, connect with other database professionals, and access videos and white papers.
As Whittaker explains, "One of the big problems that exists today is you may know how you're doing in benchmarking relative to your own environment, but it's hard to get a sense what your performance is like relative to outside of your environment." With Toad for Oracle 11.5, DBAs will be able to share analytical statistics on their environment with other Toad community users and collaborate towards achieving greater productivity and efficiency within their databases.
For more information visit www.quest.com/toad-for-oracle/.