Computer software, or simply software, is a collection of data or computer instructions that tell the computer how to work. This is in contrast to physical hardware, from which the system is built and actually performs the work. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data. Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own.
SQL is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data where there are relations between different entities/variables of the data. SQL offers two main advantages over older read/write APIs like ISAM or VSAM: first, it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command; and second, it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, e.g. with or without an index.
Database administrators (DBAs) use specialized software to store and organize data.
Database administrators and application developers often face constantly changing environments which they rarely completely control. Many changes result from new development projects or from modifications to existing code, which, when deployed to production, do not always produce the expected result.
For organizations to better manage development projects and the teams that develop code, suppliers of SQL programming tools normally provide more than facility to the database administrator or application developer to aid in database management and in quality code-deployment practices.
A team is a group of individuals - humans, horses, or oxen, for example - working together to achieve their goal. As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, "[a] team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal".
Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use.
Features
SQL programming tools may include the following features:
SQL editing
SQL editors allow users to edit and execute SQL statements. They may support the following features:
A database trigger is procedural code that is automatically executed in response to certain events on a particular table or view in a database. The trigger is mostly used for maintaining the integrity of the information on the database. For example, when a new record is added to the employees table, new records should also be created in the tables of the taxes, vacations and salaries. Triggers can also be used to log historical data, for example to keep track of employees' previous salaries.
A table is a collection of related data held in a table format within a database. It consists of columns, and rows.
Some tools also provide features to display dependencies among objects, and allow users to expand these dependent objects recursively (for example: packages may reference views, views generally reference tables, super/subtypes, and so on).
Session browsing
Database administrators and application developers can use session browsing tools to view the current activities of each user in the database. They can check the resource-usage of individual users, statistics information, locked objects and the current running SQL of each individual session.
User-security management
DBAs can create, edit, delete, disable or enable user-accounts in the database using security-management tools. DBAs can also assign roles, system privileges, object privileges, and storage-quotas to users.
In computing, privilege is defined as the delegation of authority to perform security-relevant functions on a computer system. A privilege allows a user to perform an action with security consequences. Examples of various privileges include the ability to create a new user, install software, or change kernel functions.
Debugging
Some tools offer features for the debugging of stored procedures: Step In, Step Over, Step Out, Run Until Exception, Breakpoints, View & Set Variables, View Call Stack, and so on. Users can debug any program-unit without making any modification to it, including triggers and object types.
A stored procedure is a subroutine available to applications that access a relational database management system (RDBMS). Such procedures are stored in the database data dictionary.
Program animation or Stepping refers to the now very common debugging method of executing code one "line" at a time. The programmer may examine the state of the program, machine, and related data before and after execution of a particular line of code. This allows evaluation of the effects of that statement or instruction in isolation and thereby gain insight into the behavior of the executing program. Nearly all modern IDEs and debuggers support this mode of execution. Some testing tools allow programs to be executed step-by-step optionally at either source code level or machine code level depending upon the availability of data collected at compile time.
In software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. It is also sometimes simply referred to as a pause.
Performance monitoring
Monitoring tools may show the database resources — usage summary, service time summary, recent activities, top sessions, session history or top SQL — in easy-to-read graphs. Database administrators can easily monitor the health of various components in the monitoring instance. Application developers may also make use of such tools to diagnose and correct application-performance problems as well as improve SQL server performance.
Test Data
Test data generation tools can populate the database by realistic test data for server or client side testing purposes. Also, this kind of software can upload sample BLOB files to database.
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