The latest Toad is now in production, 11.5, get it from http://toadfororacle.com.
If you have an old license key, 9.6 or older, it may complain at installation time, just ignore. It will be fine at run time.
Enhanced TAB browsing experience, nicer and more visible colors for your connection (production=red…), read-only connections.
Currently it still requires a 32bit clients, even when running on a 64bit Operating System.
OpenWorld season is open, while Oracle announced linux database appliance, Quest launched Toad11 ! I have been actively beta-testing toad 11 and I am excited to download it. 421Mb for the 11.0 Commercial installer, 41Mb for the READ-ONLY version 
I got this question once again today in a previous post.
What’s wrong by using Toad against a database?
The worst case scenario:
- some non-technical staff is clicking around in your production database with read-write access 
The best-case scenario :
- nobody has access to your database
Here is a short list on how you could protect your data :
- Give the right privilege to the right person. DBA role to the DBA, CREATE TABLE/CREATE INDEX to the developer, INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE to the application
- Restrict access to your database server. Use some firewall. Allow only the dba workstation and the application server to the Production environment
What if the end-user PC needs access to the Production database with a powerfull user? This often happend in real world. A fat client is installed on the PC, the password is somehow hardcoded, the privileges granted to the hardcoded user are uterly generous…
It is not a bad practice in this case to block access to the database server to Toad/SQLPLUS and thelike. This will very ineffeciently prevent some garage-hacker from corrupting your database, but it will prevent your sales / marketing colleagues from deleting data, locking tables and degrading performance. This could be done by some login triggers or, my preference, some administrative measures like information, auditting and sanctions.
This Toad 11 beta new feature made me so happy !
Not only you can specify a color for your connection (ex: red=prod, green=devl), and this color is much more visible than it was in previous version of TOAD, but now you can set your connection to be read-only.
For any reason, bored, ill, under pressure, tired, you may screw up your database one of those days.
I feel so good that I can now setup my prod connection to be read-only. It is REALLY cool.
Setting the connection read-only is a TOAD feature. As it is in beta it may not be 100% bullet-proof. Mostly it allows you to do only SELECT in the editor, even if you are logged in as SYSTEM or SYS.
Anything comparable in SQL Developer?