Overview of developer features in Toad for DB2 Part II

Toad for DB2 has a database-mapping feature that allows you to visually see the relationships between your objects. It's more than an ER diagram that shows relationships between tables. This database map feature shows relationships between all of your object types. So you could develop this in several different ways. You could select one or more objects, right-click, and say Show on Database Map, and a new Database Map tab opens up. And the object, and optionally its referenced objects and its dependent objects, are loaded into a visual display. Now, this display can be moved. It could be formatted. It could be zoomed. I'm using the mouse wheel to zoom right now. We also have a zoom control on the side here. You could actually use it, zooming up or down. And so one thing you'll notice, like I said, differently than a ER diagram. There's different object types here. You can see that a table has a relationship to constraints or functions or triggers or other tables or views. So all this information is visually shown on this database map. And you could use the controls on top to filter. For example, if you did not want to see this table's referenced objects, you could click there. Or if you did not want to see this table's dependent objects, you could click there. And so basically, what's going to happen is that the display is going to change by either removing or adding the dependent or referenced objects. I'm going to click Dependent Objects again to come back with this very robust display. And this is display could be formatted it in several different ways. A layout could be changed to a tree. It can be changed-- I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And so you can see the contents of the tree with the table and all its dependents below. It's a pretty cool view. It could be changed to several other things, like circular. Like a circular reference, where the table and goes out in a circle depicting all its referents and dependent objects. I prefer this, which is a more rectangular type of view. And this view can be printed. It can be saved and restarted each time. So once you you're fine with the customization of it, you can save it. You can move objects are individually as well, if you want to. One thing that is a very handy is we have a visibility control in this feature that allows you to decide which objects you want shown in this database map. So for example, if you're not interested in foreign key, primary key, check constraints, packages, functions, procedures, you just uncheck those. And then, the diagram will get rid of those. And then, you could use different layouts to format the remaining objects in a particular fashion. We also have an ability to hover over objects. So when you hover over objects, the object that you hover over will be the actual object. And its dependent objects will turn, the outline of those will turn, blue. And then, the outline of its reference objects will turn blue. And I'll try to demonstrate that here. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit. If I hover over the table, you'll see indeed the table's outline, turned it gold. And its dependent objects turn blue. And its dependent object way over here-- this tablespace-- will actually turn red. So it's another hint of how objects are related to another, just by hovering over a particular object. We also have the ability to choose objects. So if you right-click on an object-- this is an active object display-- all the actions show up here, just as they would if you right-clicked on an object in the Database Explorer. And here, we give you the ability to multi-select objects using the Control. So if you use Control, Control, Control, you can actually see that we keep a count of how many objects are selected. And you could do things such as send those to any other feature of our product, such as if you wanted to extract the DDL quickly for those objects, you could do that. So a very handy feature that shows the relationships between your objects. And again, it's more than an ER diagram. It is a full relationship viewer. And there are several options that can be set. So for example, you could actually set the arrow. You could customize the arrow. You could customize when the feature shows up, do we automatically include reference and dependent objects? And do we go down multiple levels are not? And you could change the shape from a rectangle to a circle or ellipse based on your preference.