KeepTool Enterprise adds three additional Oracle tools, ER Diagrammer, PL/SQL Debugger and DB Compare. It addresses some special needs — beyond what is included in KeepTool Professional.
For example, from time to time, you may need a diagnostic tool to help you see where your PL/SQL code is failing (PL/SQL Debugger). Or you may find a graphial representation of the table relationships within a newly developed project to be a useful part of your documentation (ER Diagrammer).
With our latest addition to our suite, DB Compare, you can always be sure that your test and production databases have the same structure. DB Compare not only checks that you have identical objects in both places, but also makes it easy to execute the DDL statements to consolidate the differences.
KeepTool Enterprise is also ideal for independent consultants who need to quickly understand and troubleshoot a client’s Oracle database.
KeepTool Enterprise new DB Compare tool prompts you to log in to each database. Thereafter, it compares one database schema with the other.
Items found in the second schema only are labelled “added.” In contrast, items found in the first schema only are considered “removed.”
The third category “changed” are objects present in both schemas but having different structure. When you highlight one of these, the DDL for each is displayed side by side.
Besides detailing the differences, a generated draft script helps you to consolidate both structures. It contains a series of DROP and CREATE statements. For comparing a database that is not accessible through your company’s network use Reverse DB to script the remote database. After that, compare as a local copy.
If you need to quickly understand the relationships between tables in a schema, ER Diagrammer presents those to you in a concise, easy-to-understand format after scanning the table definitions and foreign-key constraints in the data dictionary.
Independent tables are shown to the left of the diagram, with the level of dependencies increasing toward the right side. A slider bar immediately lets you zoom in on any portion of a complex schema. A subset function lets you generate and save a new diagram around a selected table and any of its neighbors.
Save the result as a file that you can share with your project team. If your database changes, re-open the file, rerun the scan, and your documentation is immediately brought up-to-date.
Software developers know that there’s only so much that the eye–or “another pair of eyes”–can detect when testing does not yield the expected results. Conditions that seem like they should be true may not be interpreted as we would expect. Variables may not contain the values that we are sure should be there.
A good debugging tool should be able to show logic paths and the variables at any point in time, in an easy to follow-way, without a lot of setup effort on the developer’s part.
KeepTool’s PL/SQL Debugger makes setup a snap by providing a skeleton call block that asks only for calling parameters to be populated. Then you can either step through your code line by line, or skip ahead to breakpoints. If you missed something, you will automatically be placed back at the top with the opportunity to watch a few more variables or to stop at different places in the flow.
Need to examine routines that aren’t normally run? It’s a simple matter to make a condition happen, or test an exception handler by altering the value of a variable. No need to force a routine to run by “temporarily” altering your code. The Debugger handles these situations with ease.
