Managing connections in Toad for SQL Server

Hello, my name is Robert Pound, and I am a product technologist at Quest. This video covers managing connections and Toad for SQL Server. Previously, we saw how to establish connections. Now we will use group and categories to organize our connections, and then use the import export functions to make our lives more productive. I have Toad open and in the connection manager, I have several connections saved. In this case, these connections represent some of the products available from Quest. For more information visit www.quest.com. Now that that shameless cross-sell discussion is complete, let's go about the business of actually organizing the connections. First, we'll talk about grouping. Grouping simply organizes your connections into folders. So if I right-click and choose create group, I can create a group called North America, for instance. And we can also create a group called APJ, just to give you an idea of what can be done. So if we wanted to move these connections in to North America, and this one into APJ. It shows you how you can quickly organize your connections. So if you wanted to work just in APJ, and if we had several connections, that would allow you to focus just on APJ. It works similar to the Windows folder directory. Next, let's take a look at categories. So, you may have noticed in the create connection, and we'll go ahead and view details now, that there was a category at the bottom. So you have three by default, development, production, and test, and you can also create new categories. So if you have another category that you want to create, and you can create magenta or purple or whatever you want, you can name it whatever you want. New cat. You can go ahead and create as many categories as you want. I'm going to choose one of the defaults. And these are done obviously by design, so by default, development is green, production is red, so I'm going to go ahead and use the right-click menu to access at this time. But you can start to establish which connections belong to what group in your organization, test, development, etc. And not only does it show up here in the connection manager, but if we go ahead and establish a few of these connections, and then open an editor with the test connection, and then select the development environment, and create an editor as well. Now you have color coded tabs that show you which environment you're actually working in, so there is no inadvertent deletion of the production environment, and to keep you on track with which connections you're actually running from. Next, let's talk about import and export. So now that we have these connections established, we can go ahead and export these out to any Toad user. I will come up to the top and use export. Now, you do have the ability to choose just one or several of these, depending on what you want to export. I'm going to go ahead and export all of these and choose Export, and give it a file name. New con fab, and go ahead and click Save. This is actually already saved out to a directory in the network. And what that's done is create an XML file for the export. And to show you the import, and the import wizard, I'm actually going to switch to another system just to show you how we can import these connections into another system. So obviously, this is another Toad for SQL Server that I have running with a different color scheme, obviously, but there's no connections here. So I can simply choose import connections, and it will walk through a wizard. Now, if you have connections already established in the Management Studio, you can go grab those, and those will show up. And if you have a central management server and a connection to it, you can go about connecting to that server and pulling in those connections from there. I'm going to choose the XML from Toad. So, if I navigate to my file share, and we can see the file that we just created, a new connection [? feb. ?] And I'm going to go ahead and click Next. Now from here, I can, again, choose any or all of them. I'm going to simply choose all of them, but these buttons allow you to move all individually or all of them. And choose Next, and Next again, and Finish. And as you can see, it also actually brought over the structure as well. We have the categories. We have the groupings. The way it was in the exported version. One thing to note, very quickly, is you can see that this connection is SQL authenticated, and I'm actually going to rename this just for simplicity. This is a SQL authenticated connection, and if I double-click on it, it's going to connect automatically. That's because this connection was created with a saved password, so if we look at the properties, we can see that save password is checked. So just be careful when you're exporting your connections. If you have this save password checked, the connection will be able to be used by anyone that can import the connection. If you right-click on the password, nobody can copy it, so don't fear that your passwords are going to be copied and used maliciously. And that's really all I had to show you today about importing and exporting, as well as organizing your connections. I hope this video helped you understand a little more about the productivity aspects of Toad for SQL Server. For more information on this product, visit www.quest.com/products/toad-for-sql-server. Or you can also check out www.toadworld.com. Thank you much. Have a great day.