Connecting to a Data Source and Building a Query in Toad Data Point Workbook

Toad Data Point Workbook is a simple concept. It's a single-- you create workbooks of work streams or workflows. And so I'm going to create a demo workbook here. We'll just call this May Demo-- whoops-- Workbook. So this is a single workbook. And inside this workbook, I start creating workflows. OK, so workflow is a set of instructions that I want the workbook to carry out. And I can have multiple workflows within the same workbook. And a workflow-- and I'll just start this one. I'll say my customer query-- it always starts with a query. Meaning, it always starts with going to grab data from a source. And so I'm going to build a results that here, and then I can work with that results set. And so when I go to build a results set, I can do it visually, meaning I can use the Query Builder, where I'm going to do drag and drop. Or if I SQL, Standard Query Language query that someone has already formatted for me, or that I have from another application, I can go directly into my editor and just paste that query into the editor. Or I could create something new in the editor, if I like to write SQL. Our Toad editor app functionality is incredibly robust. This is the same-- built on the same technology that Toad for Oracle, which is the product we've had in the market for over 20 years, which is really a standard for Oracle in particular query writing. It's using the same technology, the editor, in that product that we use in this product. So incredibly robust, with lots of features and formatting and whatnot. I tend to like the visual and I think it kind of fits this whole workbook approach as well, doing something visually. So I'm going to go into my visual editor. First thing, which source am I going against, right? Which database or a data source-- because it could be an Excel file or NoSQL environment-- am I going to pull the data from? These are all of the ones that are currently in my environment. I can pick one of these. I could go ahead and add a completely new connection here. And as I kind of showed in that last-- quickly before, this new connection that I make could be against anything. Could be going into Redshift, Oracle in the cloud, Vertica, Teradata. I can go to against, grabs data from Salesforce. If I have a Hive implementation I want to grab data from, I can do it there. So as far as connecting to nearly any data source, there's very few data sources out there that we don't connect to, whether through a named connection here or using a generic ODBC connection. I'm going to use my SQL server demo system here. And now that I've done this, I have a basic-- switch my database to my QA test-- a basic drag and drop environment to grab data, OK? So I'm going to grab my-- I'll grab my contact data here. If I wanted to, I could also grab, let's say address data, drop that into my environment, drag and drop to make connections. I can say I want to pull all rows from contact and any matching rows from address. I can choose which columns I want, either by selecting all, or just saying I just want first name, last name, fax, home phone, a birthdate, email address. And let's choose address line 1 needs to be city state, country, and we'll say zip. So picking down here, I can remain columns. Let's take sex and just make it gender. Home phone, birth date, we'll just call it a Bday. Super easy to work with this visual editor. I can choose to limit what fields I want to bring in. We'll just do certain states. I can do where state is equal to, and it pulls down a list of all the states available in this address table. So it automatically gives me a distinct list of what's available in the address table. And I can choose either equaling a particular one, or we'll say it's in, and we'll say, let's say in these first couple of states here. And then I just go ahead, and I can execute that query against the database. It'll bring back all of that data for me, OK? It's renamed the columns. It's limited the values. Very easy to write the query. It actually also gives me a little insight into the actual query that I've written. And so I've got this Query tab here. I can actually see the query as I write it. So that's nice. If I want to get more used to SQL, I can do that. I can develop the query here and see the nuances of what's being actually written over here.