While hard drive redundancy on a local workstation is a great idea to insure very little downtime in the case of a local hard drive failure, if backups are being made, copies should be made both in-house and off-site, so that the likes of accidents, fires, or acts-of-God do not leave you at a complete loss.

External DVD Burners or offsite network repositories are simple, easy ways to perform off site backups.   And if those don’t seem convenient, there are also a number of paid services, such as Backblaze, that can also make off site backups secure and painless.

Here’s to hoping that Dr Neville’s research was backed up off-screen.

The first time I used it was around 2001 when I was working on site at a contract and it was the preferred tool used by most of the developers there.  We were using an Oracle database and I really preferred the sql plus client that Oracle provides because I felt closer to my comand-line roots.  The bug I experienced with Toad was that a stored procedure I had written could not be found at all.  The stored procedure was really there, it was running, but Toad could just not find it in its list.  The solution was to remove the stored procedure via sql plus client and then re-create it in Toad.

The second instance was when I was working a separate contract and Toad had actually been banned from use.  Again, we were working with an Oracle database and another developer had been executing some queries with Toad that left some tables locked causing a major outage.  I can’t completely confirm that the problem wasn’t user related as I know there are a few ways to lock up a table, but being my second experience working with Toad, it didn’t leave a good impression on me.

I am using MySQL for a project and I noticed that Toad offers the MySQL version of its product as Freeware, so I am considering giving it another go.  This would also give me an opportunity to say "Three strikes and your out!".