The Alzabo Schema Editor is Sweet

[metaperl]

I had been building databases solely by the Alzabo programmer API but I just thought I would try the Mason-based schema editor... and man was I impressed.

You can browse around in my 2-table schema here

[castaway]

It looks not bad, I guess. The thing that miffed me while looking for perl/DBI based schema editors, is that all that I found only do tables. Where are views, triggers, stored procedures, sequences and so on? Does nobody use them?

Anyway, no offense to Alzabo, but its kinda minimalist, so I'm making my own.. (who knows, it may be finished some day..)

C.

[autarch]

Here's a crazy idea. You could offer patches to Alzabo.

[castaway]

Yes, I could. Here's the history, I was originally looking for something that uses Perl/DBI to create/edit/update database schemas with, which I couldn't find any of. Alzabo must of missed my search entirely at that stage, I'm not sure why. So I started to look for CPAN SQL schema type modules, which encompassed as complete a selection of SQL bits as possible. There are quite a few modules, most were disgarded because all they knew were tables.

As far as I remember, from re-looking at Alzabo just now, it failed my criteria because of that, and because the interface just seemed pretty complex. (For me, that means each module has heaps of methods whose names dont immediately suggest their function). I still didn't notice that it has something to design schemas with, I guess I missed it somehow.

Anyhow, I'm now basing my tool on SQL::Translator, and contributing code to that. It's probably missing some stuff that Alzabo has, but its understandable (to me), has a nice internal format, which it can convert to/from multiple SQL/other formats (currently Oracle, SQLLite, MySQL, DB2, PostGres, Sybase, TT, GraphViz, HTML... ) which means all I need to build is the actual interface to create/modify the schema objects, and buttons to export/import from the available formats.

In short, sorry, I would, but at this stage it would probably only be an Producer for SQL::T to make something Alzabo can read, and vice versa.

C.

[fraterm]

Woah! I haven't been this impressed with a UI that relates to perl, since, well, perldoc... all the more reason to try out Mason for me. Thank me for Swaths...