PowerSQL

Don’t be the last person on the planet to download the PowerSQL beta at http://www.embarcadero.com/powersqlbeta/ . I am very excited about this product I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in making this project a success past and present. A lot of people have left their signatures in the components of this tool. Ultimately it was unbelievable efforts of the current team that has resulted in the product you see today. And what a product it is, there are so many cool features in this product I don’t know where to start. I am going to narrow in on one hard to find feature but heavily requested in our current product line.

SQL Filters can be found by selecting a Data Source, right click Properties and choosing SQL Filters. Or by Windows->Preferences… and choosing SQL Development, SQL Filters. From either place it is fairly simple to add whatever filters you want. You can even make use of like and in operators. These filters are then applied to the SQL used to retrieve data from the data dictionary thus reducing the cost of retrieving information from the server. Don’t be fooled by client side filters that are still network intensive. SQL Filters is a major plus for people working with robust database environments. Honestly if that is even remotely cool to you then you have to check this product out.

As you can see from my links I am going to EclipseCon in March. Incidentally there will be a big PowerSQL announcement then… wonder what that will be? Anyhow if you are going to be at EclipseCon look out for me, would love to meet a single person who has read my blog. Look for the guy with the blackberry… on second thought look at my picture on this blog. Going to EclipseCon and PowerSQL remind me of a late friend. I first brought the PowerSQL then know as the Talon project to Eclipse World back in 05 and showed it to some Eclipse folks with the Product Manager at the time David Ross. Although his stay on PowerSQL was brief he too left a bit of himself in this product, we miss you Dave.

New Beginnings

I have been reading blogs for some time and recently realized I was starting to encourage others however had never done it myself. As one who often cares about consistency and fluid approach it seems almost hypocritical not to start blogging, so viola the virgin post. Fortunately I have never been shy about sharing my opinions, but enough about that since I am probably the only who cares.

In my current role at Embarcadero I spend a lot of time debating feature sets and functionality we would like to pour into our products in order to appeal to people whom work with databases. Luckily I don't have to make those decisions on my own. I have host of people with the Program Management (PGM) title telling what they think and making decisions. But bigger then that is the willingness of our customers to share opinions and ideas regarding our products. Probably the pinnacle of this is a two day marathon of ideas shared among customers whom belong to our Product Advisory Committee that concluded last week. I know this event as the PAC meetings or in some cases just the PAC.

The PAC was incredible this year, the amount of information I collected left me truly exhausted. This was the first time I got to spend time with customers who represented everything in our defined life cycle of Design, Develop, Manage all at the same time. I would like to share some of the information I received.

• MySQL is growing in popularity in larger organization looking to cut costs.
• Real time feedback is really cool
• Data replication is huge
• Any kind of feedback that improves the quality of the SQL created is really cool
• A little heads up if the table is replicated or big before making a change would be nice
• Our products are more than just tools, they are work flow which affect how people work and think
  
• Find a good way to share new feature information so that people know new feature is there

Phew, what a list. Ok there was a lot more stuff that I will share another time. Thankfully we have some new tools planned that might help us with some of these points. One of which will be introduced very soon. More on that later. The last point was of particular interest to me. As such I would like to share a new feature that isn't easy to find in our latest versions of DBArtisan and Rapid SQL. I have only ever know this feature as extraction tags. By inserting ETStart or ETEnd into the comment of a procedure creation text will result in the text being put before or after the procedure DDL allowing for some pre and post complation commands. The best example is the use of a temp table with in a procdure.

CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go

The above text would not execute on it's own. However if this were extracted in DBArtisan or Rapid SQL, the text would look like this:

CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
go
CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go
DROP TABLE #temp_table
go

which would compile, pretty cool. There are plenty of other uses for such a feature.

If you are a customer of Embarcadero and are interested in the PAC please contact your sales representative or contact me directly via email.

First blog ever finished!