Re: [gnome-db] getting mergeant to 1.0

[Danilo Schoeneberg <dj starfire-programming net>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 02:55, Chris Silles wrote:
> On Thursday 18 September 2003 00:32, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > If people can comment on this app, or any other with good UIs, please do
> > it. I would like to start working on all this (or whatever comes up)
> > ASAP, so please, comment quick, so that we can take advantage of the 6
> > months cycle.

Well if you really look for some example of a good UI, I think a look at
T.O.A.D is the best way to do so. It's a developer tool designed for
Oracle databases and enjoys huge success in professional companies. Our
company for instance is flogging out some serious money for it every
year and having such a tool for Gtk+ Environments with the added bonus
of access to other databases could prove quite a rewarding step.

> As of yet I haven't been able to check out Mergeant since my machines don't 
> seem to want to cooperate with Gnome, however Danilo has brought the concept 
> of other UI's to my attention before and this seems like a suitable time and 
> place to contribute them.

Well apart from the pain we shared getting your machines to accept some
gnome-ish sources [remind me to slap the first SuSE employee that I
should ever happen to run into ;)] ...
I agree with Chris on that part, we should provide more variety on the
tool sector. We should also think about integration into configuration
tools like SuSE's yast or whatever the big distro's use.

> I think we could benefit from a command-line 'monitor' program (similar to 
> those supplied with most db backends).. While this wouldn't be too 
> complicated to create, it would require absolute conformity from all 
> providers (with respect to handling of NON-SELECT queries and similar 
> inconsistencies - which hopefully will be eradicated in the near future).

Bingo! That idea has been brought up in the past and something in the
line of mysql, psql or Sql*Plus is definitely needed. I think I have
some started sources on my home machine already.

> An extension on this idea would be an ncurses based User Interface, a 
> text-mode Mergeant as it were. If there is any interest in this I could be 
> tempted to satisfy my masochistic urges and have a go at it.. (Could be quite 
> useful for remote management of libgda systems?)

not quite sure on that one, it would be a considerable pain to implement
some usefull way to display for instance a db-table or result set and
I'm not sure if the demand would really make it worth the pain you're
about to suffer from ;-)

> Maybe I'm pulling in a different direction Rodrigo on this one (i.e looking at 
> simple basic UI's instead of fancy OSX style tree thingys), but maybe we 
> could benefit from them? Reactions?

Long live the command line. In the case of a simple commandline client
and maybe an import/export tool (á la sqlloader or mysqldump) I couldn't
agree more. Admins are a pragmatic breed and they aint gonna start up a
big gnome app to test some queries, so a set of nifty little comandline
tools is definitely needed.

> Cheers - Chris

Cheers - Danilo


Ps: off-record question, is that "Cheers" sorta becoming standard around
here ? ;-)