News

Toad Tackles DevOps

• By David Ramel
• September 29, 2017

Quest Software, known for its popular Toad database management tool, is now pointing it at the growing DevOps space.

Toad is used by database developers, database administrators and data analysts to manage both relational and non-relational databases using SQL.

Sometime next month, it will provide DevOps functionality in the form of the new Toad DevOps Toolkit.

Quest said its tool will help enterprises practicing DevOps continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes automate changes to their databases. The company's upcoming Toad for Oracle 2017 R2 release will add support for the DevOps toolkit and be released along with it.

"With the Toad DevOps Toolkit, developers and DBAs can quickly and easily automate many of the critical database development functions within existing DevOps workflows without compromising quality, performance or reliability," the company said in a statement yesterday.

Specifically, it will reportedly let Oracle database developers and DBAs:

• Test PL/SQL against pre-defined requirements with the Code Tester feature that helps test functionality of code to ensure quality during the automated build process and through continuous integration and deployment.
• Perform static code reviews to ensure quality standards and maintainability via Code Analysis that provides an automated way to determine minimum quality level threshold during code reviews to relieve the challenges associated with reviewing coding standards.
• Compare and sync between source and target databases and generate sync scripts by ensuring schema, data and database integrity when deploying changes across database types -- for example, from developer databases to quality assurance databases -- and generates change scripts to deploy build artifacts into the DevOps pipeline.
• Promote build artifacts into target environment to visualize success or failure with script execution that simplifies the process of implementing changes.
• Integrate into virtually any continuous integration and continuous delivery tool, such as Jenkins, Bamboo and Maven.

In a blog post earlier this month, Quest's John Pocknell said the tool was the result of a Toad user survey combined with two years of working with customers to identify challenges they face in tying Oracle database operations into their DevOps infrastructure. He characterized this integration as a bottleneck that hinders the ability to bring database operations into their implementation plans.

"Toad DevOps Toolkit reduces the database bottleneck by making it easy to execute key database development functions within your DevOps workflow -- without compromising quality, performance or reliability," Pocknell said.

"This unique Windows application exposes key Toad for Oracle functionality as programmable objects. For example, you can test PL/SQL code to ensure functional correctness; review it to make sure it meets standards for quality and maintainability; perform database, schema and data compare and sync to ensure integrity and mitigate risks; and implement scripts to physically deploy database changes throughout the release pipeline."

No pricing information was provided for the tool, which will be showcased at the Oracle Open World conference that starts next Monday in San Francisco.