Suggestions start with any errors, but go much further in proposing ways to make it more readable and easier to maintain. Toad Xpert, for example, will analyse your PL/SQL, T-SQL or SQL code and make suggestions as to how it can be optimised. No matter which version you work with, Toad has some excellent options. If you choose the suite for database administrators, you can create reports on hundreds of aspects of your database performance, schemas and security settings. It has automated SQL optimisation and gives you version control, code reviews and reports. Toad’s main purpose is to let you create, edit, and format code that works as efficiently as possible. There are user groups and forums that are active and helpful, and if you get stuck the chances are you’ll find someone to help. It’s a tribute to the strengths of Toad that it has very loyal users, particularly on the Oracle platform. There are versions for everybody from single users to large corporations, and for both specific database servers and heterogeneous environments running different servers. In addition to Oracle, databases covered by Toad include SQL Server, IBM DB2 and MySQL, along with cloud databases, NoSQL and Hadoop, extending Toad to modern big data environments. The Toad family of software was originally written for use with Oracle databases, but now has versions for most database servers, and covering a variety of database user roles. Of course, if you’re using an open-source database such as MySQL, the built-in tools are much less impressive, and your company won’t have spent thousands on the server, so you may find it slightly easier to justify the outgoings. If you’re going to justify spending more money, then the products you’re buying have to be seriously impressive. Given the eye-watering price of some of the database servers, your finance director will probably expect the management tools that come with it to do everything, including making the tea. The big name modern servers come with their own increasingly sophisticated administration interfaces, but alongside the ‘native’ tools and utilities there’s a thriving set of third party software companies that offer tools to help you get the best out of your database. Database management servers are large, complex applications, so how can you be sure you’re getting the best out of them in terms of performance and productivity? Many database administrators spend their time just keeping the thing up and running there just aren’t the resources for fine-tuning performance or documenting changes in structures and schemas.

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