The development of TOYS

The Past

TOYS was conceived from the need to automate the configuration and management of Oracle® databases in the development life cycle. This is an area where our services were often utilised. We looked around for tools, however, many products claimed to "solve all" and most fell far short. Products were often excruciatingly slow to use and often tedious. In addition to being limited, many products have been found to be "buggy".

Initially a prototype of TOYS was written in Perl5. This Perl program was used successfully on a number of commercial projects that we were involved in. It proved to be extreamly reliable with respect to schema comparisons and the generated DDL synchronization scripts.

Despite giving proof to our concept, the Perl version was somewhat limited. It suffered from the following major deficiencies:

• It was a command line program.
• It only supported single schema comparisons and synchronizations.
• It did not allow for archiving / retrieval of snapshots.

TOYS has now been written in C++ as a GUI product targeting the Microsoft® Windows® platform.

Future Plans

Our plans for TOYS include:

• Internationalization (European countries only).
• Port to LINUX.
• Support for other databases including: Microsoft® SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, PostgeSQL.

TOYS was originally a side-line project, however, it has now become our main stream focus. If you like our software, we would appreciate your support. With your support, we can enhance TOYS and in return provide you with the support you deserve.