I recently attended a daylong seminar about the Oracle front end "Tools for Oracle Applications Developers" or TOAD. It was one of those few company sponsored events that leave you inspired, more productive and wiser. One of the best things about it is that the presenters were very candid about their company, Quest Software, and the Toad product. The depth and breadth of their candor led me to believe that their company operated this way and that it wasn't just a put-on for the public. They discussed competing products and talked freely about the shortcomings of their own product. Steven Feuerstein, the author of several Oracle books, is employed by them as some kind of court jester. He gave a sarcastic presentation that seemed to make the other Quest employees cringe. They were open about the fact that Toad sometimes crashes and had to close down toad once or twice during the presentations. The coolest insights I got from the training are: 1. Use Toad to model my SQL before I stick it in a web application. That is, Toad knows Oracle SQL and your table structure. You can write queries in toad and it will correct them and sometimes build them for you. 2. I always thought that there was some reason beyond my understanding that Oracle didn't have a Boolean datatype. This secret reason must be so powerful as to make up for the pain caused when I use numeric 0 and 1 for Booleans while the people upstairs use 'T' and 'F' and people downstairs use 'Y' and 'N' Steven Feuerstein assured me that it should have them and the way to work around their absence is by hiding Booleans in a function.
The SWAG was pretty good for a free seminar (breakfast, lunch, nice lined notebook). They tossed Toad T-shirts to audience members that answered questions. Overeager for a T-shirt, I answered several questions only to see mine tossed by mistake to another joker who had given the wrong answer!
I wrote up more details about what I learned about TOAD.
1:19:56 PM 
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