Getting started with Toad for DB2: Chapter 6 - Tables and Data Grids

All right, another thing I want to demonstrate is talk about the data grid. I'm going to show-- and we've got a little bit of data, not a lot. But there's some data. In this table. I'm to go to another table, one of my stage tables. And I've got several of those. I've got a football player's table. And you can see that there's-- let's talk about several things. These grids are very powerful grids. You can see that we've identified the key or unique columns by a key thing so you can know right away that this is a unique table. And I'm going to show you some new things. For example, if you wanted to sort by a column, you just click on the column header. And, by default, we didn't load all the column rows. But now, since I'm requesting a sort, it's going to finish up loading all the tables. So it's going to load the rest of the rows of the table and then allow me to do my sort. So if I wanted to, for example, sort by weight, I could sort by weight just by clicking on it. It toggles ascending to descending. If I wanted to sort by anything else, I could do the same thing. I'm going to basically go back up to and sort by player ID. With this grid-- this is called the grid-- you could display many things. So I'm going to show you a Group By box. So if you wanted to, for example, group by any one of these columns, you just drag those columns up to this Group By area and the results become displayed and grouped by that. And you could do compound grouping. So, for example, if you want to not only display group by team name and maybe position, there'll be two levels of grouping. So now you can see that, for the Bears, they're organized by position. If you only wanted to see the defensive backs for the Bears, you could just expand those, so very easy to customize a display for yourself by grouping by one or more columns in a display. And you can move the columns. If you wanted the column to appear before another, you could just slide those over. If you wanted to do some additional filtering, so, for example, on any of these columns, there's a little funnel. If you click on that, it will give you the ability to select some unique values that we find. So if we only wanted to see the kickers, for example, you just click on click on the K. And in this football database, it is listing only the kickers. And you can see that the criteria is active down here. If you wanted to get rid of that filter criteria, you could just exit this and it will go away. If you wanted to create a custom criteria, so, for example, I'm on the weight column, I might want to say, only show me the players where the weight is greater than 300 pounds. So this is a custom filter here. And you can see that it is delimited the display to only be those players with a weight of over 300, so very powerful filtering in this grid. I'm going to click x to get that off. Other things you could do, you could remove columns. If you didn't want a column in the display, you could temporarily remove it from the display so you won't have to scroll to the right if you had many columns in your display. And there are things that you could do very easily from the grids. So if you right click on any cell on the grid, this action menu comes up. And it's very easy to export this, for example, using the quick export feature. If you wanted to export this to an Excel file, you could just click and it will generate an Excel file with all of those rows in it. If you wanted to see the Excel file, we have a hyperlink on it. This will launch Excel and bring up that Excel file as we exported it, so very handy, very quick way of actually getting to that Excel information from any type of grid. And there's many other things that you can do via right click inside of a grid. I like this one. For example, if you right click on a grid and say Histogram Tool, this is going to launch our histogram display, which is going to show the distribution of that column. So I chose college. And this is going to give me, by default, the top 10 colleges in this list of my result sets here in my grid. And you could change that. Once you're in this histogram display, you could say, well, show me my top 10 positions, right? So my top five positions will be, which are the most popular, defensive back, linebacker, defensive end? So a very handy quick and easy way to sort of look at the distribution of data in your data grids, that's called the histograms display. And there are many more right-click options as well. We'll get to those perhaps in a different, more advanced training.