Re: Off Topic: TOAD becoming extinct in Australia

Most of the cases are that picking a tool is not purely based on what it can do/how much it costs, rather than based on politics, which is sad for some corporates. In my previous company, there were a lot of software/tools, only used by one or two persons, but nobody talked about it. Luckily, nobody challenged the validity of using TOAD in all companies I have been working with. 

 

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 From: "Tryon, Christopher S" <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> 
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 1:26 PM
Subject: RE: [toad] Off Topic: TOAD becoming extinct in Australia
   
 
   
 
I have said many times before on this forum, the cost is not just the $ for the product, but the experience you have gained over the years with the tool. Especially on tasks that don’t occur often. Yes, you could probably write select… in 30 seconds on S-Dev, but with that argument, use sql*plus.
 
Training/Experience…10 years using the #1 tool on the market ($50k/year) is about $500,000. So the argument is to throw away that kind of investment? You tell me who’s asking the stupid questions. This is the same reason that iPhone users won’t go to Android. They don’t want to learn a new system. When critical systems are down is not the time to find out if the new free tool worked the same way. 
 
Think of it this way…if my billing rate is $150 USD, just a day’s worth of lost productivity pays for Toad. That day won’t come in the first week, but over a period of time (and is hard to quantify, just like productivity for developers).
 
And another way…let’s get a committee together to evaluate other tools. 3-4 people, probably 3-4 hours each. Using the same rate, you quickly burn through any potential savings.
 
The argument I am using, is that anything that costs about a day’s billing is more expensive to talk about it rather than just buying it. While at work, you are constantly burning through money as most devs aren’t pro bono.
 
None of these points talk about any specific features of product X. Feel free to replace “Toad” with “hammer”, “screwdriver”, “vi”, “emacs”, etc. We all have favorites of those as well.
 
It does make sense for everyone in an office to be on the same tool (use what your friends use). We are a mixed office with some on S-Dev, some on PL/SQL Developer,  and <b>most</b> on Toad.
 
Chris
 
From:[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of r_squires
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 12:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [toad] Off Topic: TOAD becoming extinct in Australia
 
  
I've worked for 3 of the major banking and investment companies in Australia now and they are all trying to remove TOAD from the workplace.

Its cost is always the main factor with management seeing 10s thousands of dollars in cost annually and hearing about Oracle's free SQL Developer and asking us to justify the cost. It's incredibly hard to quantify all of the little things TOAD provides that make it the best tool for the job, its just a few dollars a day but that's not how management see it.

As a big TOAD advocate I always get involved in the discussions around cost and its usefulness as a tool but as more and more people start to use SQL Developer and fewer of us TOAD users remain I suspect that probably in the next couple of years TOAD will no longer be used by many of these big organisations.

Is this just an Aussie thing or are other organisations looking at costs and paring back their use of TOAD?

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