Quest Toad and Big Data

Darin Bartik, Vice President and General Manager, Database Management,  Quest Software stopped by to introduce me to Quest Toad and let me know what it does to help organizations better utilize their data.

What is toad?

Tool for Oracle Application Developers (Toad) is a database tool that was designed by Jim McDaniel and was developed to make it easier for Oracle developers and administrators to view and manipulate the Oracle Dictionary, indexes, tables and stored procedures. Since its was first made available, the number of platforms Toad supports and been expanded dramatically. Now, Toad solutions support Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, Sybase, PostgreSQL, Teradata, Netezza, Hadoop, SQL Azure, and more.

So, Toad is a tool allowing database developers to manipulate and move data from one database to another, from a local system (both physical and virtual) to cloud-based database systems.

Snapshot Analysis

Quest is known for developing or acquiring smart, simple tools that do a small number of things, but do them very well. These tools are often easy to use and are very cost effective.

Organizations often are maintaining several different workload specific databases. Finding and moving useful data from one database to another is often a complicated and somewhat painful process. If the organization is also beginning to use cloud-based database products to gather, filter and analyze operational data, the task can turn from a "one shot" exercise into a recurring problem.

Tools such as Toad can be very helpful in managing workload specific databases and moving useful data into a Big Data tool, such as Netezza or Hadoop, on a scheduled or event driven basis.

If your organization is working with a number of independent databases and is considering the use of Big Data tools to gather, filter and analyze the data to develop new insights, Quest Toad just might be a wonderful addition to the database developer's tool kit.