Data Warehousing and ETL

Auto replace shortcuts in Toad

BI Future

A very handy tip for Toad for Oracle client: you can create shortcuts for the most used SQL statements or whole queries by adding them to Auto Replace list. Thanks to that feature when you’ll type the shortcut in the editor’s area Toad will automatically replace it with a pre-defined phrase.

Toad_Auto_replace

How to add an auto replace shortcut in Toad?

Go to View / Toad Options:

AutoReplaceToadMenu

Choose Editor / Behavior and click on Auto replace button.

Auto_replace_in_Toad

Let’s add three shortcuts for auto-replace:

 scaf - select count(*) from
 saf - select * from
 wer - where

Auto_replace_in_Toad2

Now after typing the shortcut Toad replaces it automatically with the whole phrase. You can also add shortcuts for whole SQL queries you use often. Keep in mind to create such shortcuts that won’t coincide with the names of objects like tables or columns.

You can achieve the same effect in SQL Developer client – I described it in the Auto replace shortcuts in Oracle SQL Developer post.

Create a non-reusable session out of reusable in Informatica

BI Future

There is an easy way to create a non-reusable object in Informatica PowerCenter out of a reusable one. This is specially useful when you want to change some settings of the session, so instead of copying the existing one you can drag the non-reusable session directly to workflow and edit the settings there.

A reusable object has the green “cycle” icon in the left corner:

Reusable_session

Notice that a non-reusable session doesn’t have that icon:

Non_reusable_session

How to create the non-reusable session out of a reusable one?

Drag a session (or other object) and just before you drop it in the Designer area hold the CTRL key.

Non_reusable_session

When you’ll hold the CTRL key you can notice that the cursor changed and now has a small  ‘+’ icon. Now you can release the object and you’ll get a non-reusable one.