Troubleshooting

SQL Monitor is a great little tool that's bundled with Toad starting at or near version 8.0. It is an extremely useful tool to see what statements Toad is generating behind the sceens.

To launch SQL Monitor from Toad find the External Tools icon menu (located between the Script Manager and Toad Options icons on the first row of icons under the main menu) and select the little upside down triangle which will drop down a menu.

If you do not see SQL Monitor in the list select the "Configure..." option. On the Tools Option window select the "Auto Add..." button and select SQL Monitor from the list that pops up. Close the Tools Option window and reselect the icon menu drop-down. You should now see the entry for SQL Monitor so select it to start SQL Monitor.

Once SQL Monitor is started on the left hand side under the "Applications" tab you should see "Toad.exe". Check the checkbox next to "Toad.exe" to start the monitoring. If you have multiple instances of Toad open or other applications like SQL*Plus that use SQL*Net and the Oracle OCI layer to connect to the DB you will see them listed on the Applications tab.

When monitoring is started all statements that you run including Toad generated ones will be logged in SQL Monitor.

Note: The icon for the External Tools menu will change to the last tool you used.

From the Toad main menu select Help→Support Bundle. A window will open containing all the vital information Support will need to help you diagnose your issue. If you are working with SQL Tuning and having issues with it you can check the "Attach SQL Tuning Support zip to emails" box. From there select one of the predefined email links to open up your default email client with the attached support bundle.

An undocumented (well, up until the help file for Toad 10.6 anyway ) way to trace the amount of time various startup routines take is to edit your TOAD.INI file and add some or more of the following lines to the [SETTINGS] section:

Debug=1
LogActivities=1
ScriptDebug=1
VCPDebug=1
ToadFree=1

What they all do? The following should help:

• Debug - Enables debugging in Toad. This creates the standard ToadDebug.txt file in the [User Files] folder.
• LogActivities - Creates a ToadActivities.log file in the [User Files] folder. This was originally added for internal debugging of certain threaded activities, such as Beta updates, Toad Tip downloads, and Toad Feedback. This creates a ToadActivities.log file in the [User Files] folder. Since these processes are being run in threaded environments, keeping a separate log file helps to reduce the number of synchronization calls inside the thread.
• ScriptDebug - Creates debugging scripts in Toad (ToadScriptDebug.txt) and Toad Script Runner (TSRDebug.txt). This is used for debugging scripts within Toad and within TSR. This creates a ToadScriptDebug.txt file from within Toad, or a TSRDebug.txt file from within TSR.
• VCPDebug - Creates a log of debugging version control calls (VCPDebug.log) in the [User Files] folder. This may return a very large amount of information and decrease Toad's performance.

• ToadFree - This is used internally to make the commercial version of Toad behave like the freeware version of Toad; however, this is not something that would be useful to anyone but the developer guys at Quest, so best avoid setting this option. .

After starting Toad there will be a new item under the Help menu: "Show Toad Debug Output" which will open a window showing the amount of time spent in various startup routines.

There are some wonderful freeware tools for troubleshooting issues with Windows© programs.

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx
  • FileMon
  • RegMon
  • Process Monitor (supersedes the above two tools)
  • Process Explorer