Release Notes

Toad^® for Oracle 17.1

Release Notes

Revised 5/23/2024

About Toad for Oracle

Toad for Oracle provides an intuitive and efficient way for database professionals of all skill and experience levels to perform their jobs with an overall improvement in workflow effectiveness and productivity. With Toad for Oracle you can:

• Understand your database environment through visual representations
• Meet deadlines easily through automation and smooth workflows
• Perform essential development and administration tasks from a single tool
• Deploy high-quality applications that meet user requirements; perform predictably and reliably in production
• Validate database code to ensure the best-possible performance and adherence to best-practice standards
• Manage and share projects, templates, scripts, and more with ease

The Toad for Oracle solutions are built for you, by you. Nearly two decades of development and feedback from various communities like Toad World have made it the most powerful and functional tool available. With an installed-base of over two million, Toad for Oracle continues to be the "de facto" standard tool for database development and administration.

Toad for Oracle resources

Toad World is a unique and valuable resource available to all Toad users. Toad World provides forums, blogs, videos, product information, Beta releases (when available), and Trial downloads for Toad products. Visit Toad World at: https://www.toadworld.com.

Two of the most-often used features of Toad World are the Forums and the Idea Pond.

• On the Idea Pond page, you can submit your ideas to improve Toad and vote for or comment on other ideas. The Toad team takes your suggestions seriously, and you may even hear back from one of our developers on the topic. We encourage all Toad users—from new to experienced—to let us know how we can improve Toad.
• On the Forum page, you can ask a question or start a discussion and view all other forums within the Toad community.

The Toad World blog pages feature a broad range of information, including topics of interest to our industry, as well as instructions from team members on how to use the latest Toad features.

The Toad for Oracle web-based training is a perfect accompaniment to your product license. This free training walks you through major product features and explains how to perform frequent tasks. You’ll also see how to utilize time-saving automation functionality. You’ll receive a certificate of completion for each course once you pass the accompanying test.

About this release

Toad for Oracle17.1 is a minor release, with enhanced features and functionality.

Toad for Oracle 17.1 includes component and requirement upgrades. These upgrades address security vulnerabilities previously identified in the third party component.

About Toad^® for Oracle^®Editions

Each Toad for Oracle Edition is packaged with additional Quest products to expand your experience.

Toad for Oracle Subscription

Toad for Oracle is now available with subscription licensing. The benefits of subscription include:

• All of the great, award-winning Toad features you have grown to love
• Access to our world-class support team, Knowledge Base, how-to videos and more
• Quest Auto Update keeping you on the latest version
• Online License Management making it easy to assign licenses to individuals, keep track of individual usage, manage organizations, and reassign unused or under-used licenses as needed to ensure license compliance
• Automatic Renewal ensuring that Toad for Oracle Subscription will be continuously available to users
• Invitations to training events like our Ask Toad and Toad Training Tuesdays series

The following products may be part of your Toad for Oracle Subscription Edition:

• Toad for Oracle
• Benchmark Factory for Databases
• Code Tester for Oracle
• Spotlight on Oracle
• SQL Optimizer for Oracle
• erwin Data Modeler Lite for Oracle

The following Toad for Oracle Subscription Editions are available:

Note: Spotlight on Oracle® includes Spotlight on Unix/Linux, Spotlight on Windows, and Spotlight on Oracle® Data Guard.

Toad for Oracle non-Subscription

Toad for Oracle non-Subscription uses offline term and perpetual licensing. This is Toad for Oracle's legacy licensing model.

The following products may be part of your Toad for Oracle non-Subscription Edition:

• Toad for Oracle
• Benchmark Factory for Databases
• Code Tester for Oracle
• Spotlight on Oracle
• SQL Optimizer for Oracle
• erwin Data Modeler Lite for Oracle
• Toad Data Modeler

The following Toad for Oracle non-Subscription Editions are available:

Note: The DB Admin Module can be added to any Toad Edition. Spotlight on Oracle® includes Spotlight on Unix/Linux, Spotlight on Windows, and Spotlight on Oracle® Data Guard.

Toad for Oracle on Mac

Toad for Oracle is now available for Mac using a new license specific for macOS. Click here to download the free trial.

It includes the great, award-winning Toad features you have grown to love with a few limitations:

• There is no installer so setting Toad to be read-only or disable internet access using command-line arguments during installation is not possible
• Scheduling tasks and Utilities | Task Scheduler are unavailable
• Auto Update is unavailable in the Subscription version
• The edition includes Toad for Oracle; additional Quest products are not included
• Team Coding does not support VCS integration
• Excel Instance and Microsoft Access formats for Export/Import features are unsupported
• Only executables bundled with Toad may be launched (e.g. Toad Script Runner); other external applications and Utilities | External Tools are unsupported
• Font choosers may appear to duplicate fonts due to truncation; Courier New, Courier New Baltic, and Courier New Greek, for example, may all show as Courier New
• Only clientless connections are supported
  • Direct connect works as usual
  • TNS and LDAP connections work as usual provided the network configuration files (e.g. tnsnames.ora, ldap.ora, and sqlnet.ora) are found on disk in either of these folders:
    • $TNS_ADMIN
    • $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
  • If TNS_ADMIN and ORACLE_HOME are not defined environment variables you may place the network configuration files in a special folder created by Toad upon first launch for this purpose; only one of these folders will exist depending on your version of Toad:
    • ~/Library/Application Support/Toad for Oracle/TnsAdmin
    • ~/Library/Application Support/Toad for Oracle Subscription/TnsAdmin

The following Toad for Oracle on Mac Editions are available:

Install

1. Download the Toad for Oracle on Mac zip file
2. Double-click the zip file; macOS will automatically extract it to the current folder
3. Optionally copy the app folder to the Applications folder; macOS will prompt you to do so upon first run if run from any other location

Uninstall

1. Quit Toad for Oracle
2. Move the app folder to Trash
3. Removing the app does not remove Toad for Oracle's configuration files; delete ~/Library/Application Support/Toad for Oracle for complete removal

For more information about the products in your Toad for Oracle Edition and the minimum system requirements for running these products, see the Toad for Oracle Editions release notes at: https://support.quest.com/technical-documents

New Features and Enhancements

Toad for Oracle 17.1

AIExplain

Using the power of AI, Toad examines your code providing an explanation of its purpose.

Note: AIExplain is a preview feature available to Toad for Oracle Subscription users. Refer to the Knowledge Base for instructions on how to enable it. Learn more about AI and Toad at Toad World.

Toad for Oracle on Mac

• Improved Editor and Data Grid fonts
• Toad's File menu is merged into the macOS File menu
• The TNS_ADMIN location is more prominent

IPv6

IPv6 support has been extended to the following features:

• Clientless database connections
• SSH
• S/FTP
• RExec

Connections

• More prominent connection color border on Connection and Window toolbar buttons
• Menu items added to the "Session" menu allow for disconnecting sessions without closing associated windows
  • "Disconnect" and "Disconnect all" will leave the connection toolbar button intact as well as all associated windows, but the underlying session to the database will be terminated
  • "End Connection" in previously releases has been renamed "Close Connection" and functions the same as it always has; the underlying Oracle session is terminated and all associated windows are closed
• Audit and Access banner text is displayed for clientless connections
• Option to allow/prevent access to the SYS.USER$ table, allowed by default (View | Toad Options | Oracle | General | "Check for access to SYS.USER$")
• Option to include/exclude "as SYSDBA" in Connection toolbar button caption, shown by default (View | Toad Options | Toolbars/Menus | Toolbars | "Include 'as SYSDBA'")

Automation Designer

• Actions and apps can be disabled to prevent them from running
• Action properties can be modified in bulk
• Generate Schema Script action supports variables in the "Top Level Directory" field
• Generate Schema/Database Script and Compare Schema/Database actions support variables for connections and source/target schemas
• Export Dataset action now executes all statements in a script and exports the results of SELECT statements
• Execute Script action will automatically check ORA error codes added to the list of ignored errors
• Execute Script action property to "Notify on script error" suppresses all errors when unchecked, shown by default
• Email action supports content type (Plain Text or HTML)
• Improved saving of the underlying data file to better support multiple, concurrent running Toad instances

Schema Browser

• Quick filters can be saved per connection
• Ctrl+F in the left side places focus in the "Quick Filter" edit
• Commit/Rollback buttons enable only when in transaction
• Tablespace "Free Space" tab displays storage used by recycle bin
• "Create insert statements for all rows" supports "Data Masking"
• Tablespaces "Objects" tab now has a button to rebuild selected objects allowing you to move them to a new tablespace
• Tablespaces "Add > Datafile" now works across multiple selected tablespaces
• Tables "Indexes" tab has "Created"
• Tables "Stats/Size" tab has "Include indexes" checkbox
• Favorites persists node expansion state
• Some commands have configurable shortcuts (View | Toad Options | Toolbars/Menus | Shortcuts)

Compare Schemas

• Comparison includes EDITIONABLE

Data Grids

• Blob preview for PDF, XLSX, DOCX (first page), Text, Image, and Hex
• Customizable context menu

Trace File Browser

• Advice for more wait events
• "Wait Summary" histogram
• The worst performing SQL is highlighted in red
• SQL binds driven by a CURSOR loop are automatically identified
• "File Header" tab added to better organize data previously shown on the "Query Summary" tab
• "Wait Summary" tab includes min/avg column
• Notes can be added to a SQL statement
• "File Preview" includes start/end times, executions, fetches, and parses

Create/Alter Schedule/Scheduler Job

• Buttons for sample start and end times

Script Execution

• Summary grid summarizes the execution/fetch/total times, number of rows, and the SQL of the other data grids

Debugger

• Breakpoints persist between debugging sessions

Workspaces

• Auto Save and Load options are separate

Create Unified Audit Policy

• Added support for CONTAINER=ALL when connected to a root CDB

Toad Script Runner

• Use F2 to toggle full screen edit area
• Connection info shown in title bar matches Toad
• Improved tab navigation with a dropdown arrow to list all tabs

Session Browser

• Start and stop tracing across all database sessions
• Active filter name is displayed in the toolbar

Login Window

• Option checkboxes have been moved to the Settings dropdown menu, e.g. Save Passwords
• TNSPING button returns the output of tnsping.exe verbatim
• Focus is restored to the grid column that was focused when the window was last closed
• Option added to place focus in the grid or right side when opened

Spool SQL

• OCI Describe events are shown

Toolbars

• Close a connection/window by middle clicking on its toolbar button

Create/Alter Datafile

• Add multiple datafiles at once
• Find/Copy now lists the default disk group (ASM)

Tablespace Map

• Display the contents of a single datafile in multi-file tablespaces

Export DDL

• Much faster when exporting multiple objects

  Note: The order of statements and number of line breaks may differ when using "One file per schema" or "One file per object type" options

Team Coding

• Improved performance working with multiple objects, e.g. check in/out

Workspaces

• "Save" saves without confirmation
• "Save as" added
• "Delete" and "Rename" options show additional info about the workspace

Toad for Oracle 17.0

Toad for Oracle on Mac

Toad for Oracle Professional DB Admin edition is now available for Mac. Click here to download the free trial.

Oracle 23c

• Support for new features in Create/Alter windows, generated scripts, and elsewhere as appropriate:
  • ANNOTATIONS
  • Boolean datatypes
  • DEFAULT ON NULL FOR INSERT AND UPDATE
  • DOMAINS
  • IF [NOT] EXISTS
  • JSON-Relational Duality Views
  • PRECHECK Constraints
  • Schema-level privileges

Editor

• Data grids can be pinned allowing for multiple statements to be executed within a single tab without losing the results of the previous execution
• Option added to trim whitespace when saving files
• Improved performance when the Navigator option to "Show references" is unchecked; also applies to the Schema Browser when viewing PL/SQL objects
• Improved performance of parameter assistance for Oracle built-in functions defined within the SYS.STANDARD package, e.g. TO_CHAR()
• Added an option to the Script Output tab that synchronizes the Editor caret position with the active Script Output data grid and vice versa
• Exporting all Script Output data grids to an Excel file now produces a summary sheet
• Old, automatic backups are purged for improved performance
• Option added to enable utPLSQL integration if it is installed; unchecking this option improves performance by eliminating internal queries, but disables all Editor support for utPLSQL test suites

Connections

• SSH connections can be made natively without needing PuTTY or similar
• Clientless connections support TCPS protocol
• Common users having the SET CONTAINER privilege can easily switch between CDB and PDB instances via the Connection Bar context menu

Connection Colors

• An option has been added to fill Toad's title bar with the active connection's color when using a color scheme and connection colors

Trace File Browser

• Improved workflow when loading files from the database server
  • Option to exclude non-SQL trace files
  • Filter by file content, e.g. SQL ID, tablename, or any text that may exist in the trace file
  • Limit files to only those produced within a specified timeframe
  • Option to preview files after retrieval

Object Palette

• Option added to "Show Subobjects" that displays related objects (e.g. table constraints, grants, indexes, triggers, etc.) just like the Schema Browser's "Show LHS Subobjects" feature

Automation Designer

• Improved Action palette
• Export Dataset action can pass variables to SQL files as parameters

Data Grids

• Columns can be sorted even when the query contains an ORDER BY clause
• Find Data and Filter Data from the context menu allows searching and filtering across multiple columns
• A refresh button has been added to the Editor Data Grid to reexecute the query
• Single Record Viewer supports copying the column header and value to clipboard

Compare Schemas

• Options added to verify that tablespaces and Oracle features exists in the target database; any violations that will cause the sync script to fail are identified in the Difference Details tab

Generate Schema Script

• Added the ability to combine related objects when generating one script per object; for example, synonyms and grants with their target objects, type/package with its body, indexes with their table, etc.
• An option has been added to include schema name in object filenames
• An option has been added to include private synonyms for objects when exporting

Schema Browser

• Improved performance when selecting Procedures, Functions, and Packages
• Added the ability to pin quick filters

Session Browser

• "Kill Session" button added to the Locks tab
• "Status" column added to the Locks tab

Import Table Data

• Added the ability to create a new table from the Import Table Data wizard prior to importing

Workspaces

• New command line parameter for launching Toad and opening a specific workspace, e.g. Toad.exe -workspace my_favorite_workspace_name

Debugger

• A new "Check Privileges" menu item is available from the main Debug menu to check the active connection for the privileges required to debug

DB Health Scan (Preview)

DB Health Scan is a new window similar to DB Health Check with improved visualization of results. This window is a preview feature with additional improvements planned for a future release.

SQL*Net Editor

• Added support for SSL parameters

TNSNames Editor

• Added support for Retry Delay, Retry Count, and Compression parameters

Toad for Oracle 16.3

Editor

• New minimap with options to control position and scale

• Support for font ligatures

• Revamped brace highlighting options to provide additional behavior

• Search across all open Editor tabs from Find in Files/Editors

• Auto Replace options to include/exclude replacement within comments and strings

• Option to lock tab positions when multi-line tab mode is enabled

• Reload file/database object improvements to support reloading all items that have been modified

• Object name highlighting option to highlight dependencies from other schemas

• Navigator option to exclude PL/SQL parameters from sorting

• Navigator option to indicate PL/SQL parameter position

• Navigator option to show references

• Context menu is customizable

• Refactoring item to replace package constant references with their literal values

• Format Code can be canceled

• Additional user experience improvements

Schema Browser

• Object quick filter support for regular expressions

• Data tab filter dialog automatically adds quotes for IN/NOT IN conditions

• Data tab filter dialog options to save size/position

• Scheduler Jobs displays "subname" field on the Run Log tab

• Tables | Copy to another schema allows setting options as the default values used each time the window opens

• Tables | Copy to another schema options to create indexes/constraints when creating non-existent tables in the destination schema

• Create/Alter Materialized View option to specify the refresh group

• ID column added to the Arguments tab for PL/SQL

• Option to lock tab positions when multi-line tab mode is enabled

Color Schemes/Dark Mode

Additional schemes

Automation Designer

• New action to run reports configured in the Reports Manager

• New action to perform single column import

• Running apps can be canceled

• Execute Script action option to suppress the progress dialog

• Action palette buttons rearranged to be more intuitive

• Expanded copy to clipboard support to areas that previously lacked it

Data Grids

• Paste from clipboard across multiple selected cells

• Sort on multiple columns

• Context menu, Appearance submenu improvements

Export Dataset

• 7-Zip and gzip compression

• Query executed when "Display all results in grid" is unchecked can be canceled

• Flat File export option to set the end of line style

• Excel File export option to retry when the file is locked by another process

• Excel File/Instance export option to allow formulas which sets the Excel column formatting accordingly

Window Bar/Menu

• Ability to rename a window by right-clicking on its Window Bar button

• Option to show individual Editor tabs on the main Window menu

Login Window/Connections

• Create multiple logins at once applying the same properties across databases defined in tnsnames.ora

• Reconnect Lost Connections feature added to only reconnect sessions that are known to be disconnected

• Test Connections from the Login window improvements to update password if an ORA-01017 is raised and multiselect output

• Filter tabs when previously used connections are displayed using one of the "Tabbed by" views

• Toad Script Runner clientless connection support

• Retry button on the connection error dialog

• Messages configured using the SEC_USER_UNAUTHORIZED_ACCESS_BANNER and SEC_USER_AUDIT_ACTION_BANNER properties in the server's sqlnet.ora are displayed and acceptance is required to make the connection

• Custom field values can be modified when editing multiple login records

Export DDL

• Option to group object DDL into folders by their object type

• Option to exclude BEQUEATH clause from Views

SQL Recall

• Improved workflow when moving items from recently used to saved

• Options moved from the toolbar to a dedicated dialog to improve toolbar usefulness

• Additional display options and usability improvements

Manage User Settings

• Automatically backup key configuration files with options to configure what is backed up, the frequency, and a discard policy for old backups

• Ability to reset user files and selectively restore configuration files from a backup

Miscellaneous

• Team Coding automatically remaps object IDs which is necessary when controlled objects have been dropped and recreated

• Code Analysis option to limit the number of violations per rule type

• Compare Schemas produces an overall summary file in addition to each comparison's individual report when the multiple schemas option is used

• Various improvements to document recovery

• Various improvements to Master Detail Browser

• Many bugs fixes and other enhancements

Enhancements from Idea Pond

Discontinued Features

Knowledge Xpert. Knowledge Xpert is no longer available on Toad World. Beginning with release 13.1, Toad components no longer reference the online Knowledge Xpert.

Ask a Question. The Go to Toad World and Ask a Question commands on the Toad World toolbar have been replaced. To ask a question, click the Forums toolbar button to go directly to the forum. To go to Toad World, click the Forums or the Browse Blogs toolbar buttons. You can also use the Help menu: Help | Toad World | Forums. This change is found in Toad for Oracle 13.1 or later.

Integration with Toad Intelligence Central. Beginning with Toad for Oracle 13.1, Toad no longer provides integration with Toad Intelligence Central. The Toad Intelligence Central window is not available and you cannot publish scripts, files, Code Analysis results, and other resources to a Toad Intelligence Central server using Toad for Oracle. You cannot connect to Toad Intelligence Central through Toad for Oracle.