Angus Thinks

Category: SQLEditor

  • Searching for an Oracle

    Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.

    Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.

    So the next step was to download and install a copy.

    First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.

    Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).

    My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.

    Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.

    Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.

    Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).

    Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).

    Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.

    The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.

  • SQLEditor 1.1b3 & softpedia

    Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
    My first minor point release application!! (x.1)

    Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.

    However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.

    I was amazed 🙂

    Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.

    And very grateful.

  • SQLEditor 1.1 nearing release

    SQLEditor 1.1 is now approaching release. It seems to have taken much longer than expected, however it does have a number of interesting improvements.

    The most interesting improvement is that it can export directly to a database. This is still slightly experimental but pretty much works.

    There is also a new structure for connector lines, the layout algorithms for each type of line have been moved into separate classes, so new types could be added in the future.

    There is a new toolbar which allows for faster object creation.

    There are also lots and lots of bug fixes (including one in the SAX XML parsing code which was causing occasional but serious problems in load and save).

    I’ve also been working on the documentation, using docbook to make everything nice and multi-purpose.

    I’m really hoping that version 1.1 can be out by the middle of next week.

  • Forum for malcolmhardie.com

    Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor.

    Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users.

    PhpBB seems a popular choice but is probably a bit more than I actually need for this project.

  • SQLEditor built for Mac On Intel

    SQLEditor has now been built for Mac OS X/Intel as well as Mac OS X/ppc. I was able to download the Xcode 2.1 release last night and worked on the port this morning. SQLEditor at the moment still has bits of Java as well as Objective C so I wasn’t entirely confident of success, but I converted the build target to the xcode native type and moved the java code into a separate target. Then I ran the build process and after a bit of fiddling I was able to produce what appears to be a working fat binary:

    file SQLEditor
    SQLEditor: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
    SQLEditor (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
    SQLEditor (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

    The new version of the application seems to run as well as the old on PPC, although it is currently set up to use the 10.4 sdk as opposed to the 10.2.8 sdk of release SQLEditor versions. (Although SQLEditor is not officially supported on less than 10.3)

    If I had a Mac On Intel machine to test it on I would be very curious to find out what happens. 🙂

    But as far as I can see, and with the assumption that the ported version will not have unexpected bugs, the process is simple.

    But will that assumption will hold? I have absolutely no idea.

  • SQLEditor

    Oracle connectivity has been one of the main things I’ve been working on this week with SQLEditor. This involved installing Oracle on my iBook. Oracle 10g is a remarkably complicated bit of software. It arrives in a 500MB+ download which takes forever to download and then a significant amount of time to install.

    My machine is also noticably short of memory for oracle because it has only 256MB of ram, rather than the 512MB recommended.

    The good news is that simple databases are now accessible using oracle, although larger ones are still a bit too big. I’m still working on trying to fix this. The idea of schemas in Oracle is also quite different in that you pretty much use one database and then sub-divide it up.

    I’ve added a nice about box to the application that now includes a two column credits section and details of the username and serial number for the application.

  • SQLEditor released!

    After a rather over-extended development cycle SQLEditor version 1.0 has now been released. Which is a great relief to me. I’ve been working on it for so long now that I can’t quite remember not working on it, which is weird. Admittedly that’s only really about 12 months, but still, it’s a significant portion of my life. It’s also the first major product I’ve released.

    In a moment of commercialism I would encourage you to buy a copy because it makes a wonderful christmas gift, or at least it might if the recipient really loved databases or if it was some other kind of program altogether. As it is, it probably wouldn’t make much of a Christmas gift. Socks or bottles of wine would be a better choice for almost anyone.

    Releasing SQLEditor isn’t the end of the situation though. Version 1.1 is already being planned and I’ve various other projects that I’m working on as well, but SQLEditor is first and will always be the first piece of software that I released for sale.

    Releasing software is complicated. In addition to the actual program, there is the distribution package, online help, the website, notifications to trackers like MacUpdate and Versiontracker, plus checking the online store is working correctly. Bad news with this release for anyone hoping for the pre-release discount. With the release of version 1.0 the offer expired.

    People keep talking about MacPAD but nothing seems to be happening at the moment, only MacShareware.net seems to be supporting it (which is logical, since the two are quite closely tied together). I’ve got a MacPAD file up now, but nothing much else. I haven’t integrated it with the release managment stuff I’ve written (a motley collection of php and make files with a bit of XML for good measure).

    If there was any market in it there is an interesting opportunity for a release management system (written perhaps in java?) that could generate everything automatically. Perhaps if I get really bored at some point I might do that.

    The next step is to write a press release and send it out today. Joy 🙁

    So, in conclusion, if you haven’t already tried SQLEditor, then version 1.0 will improve your life so much that you won’t know how you got by without it. Or at least might save some time when designing SQL databases.

  • Java FileWriter, XML and UTF-8

    Oddly enough the java.io.FileWriter class doesn’t use UTF-8 by default. I’m not exactly sure what the default encoding is (possibly ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII?) but it doesn’t seem to be UTF-8, which is odd given that java strings are supposed to be unicode. This causes a problem if you want to have non-ascii characters and you don’t realise what’s happening. This was a bug in SQLEditor and somebody accidentally typed an umlaut into one of the fields and the file wouldn’t reload. (Which was annoying).

    The correct thing to do seems to be to use the following:

    OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(path),"UTF-8");

    Which ensures that you are using UTF-8.

    I suppose that the motivation for this is that it means that simple use of FileWriter is compatible with applications that are not unicode aware and don’t support UTF-8. It probably makes sense at some level, but it just goes to show that you can’t assume anything. 🙂

    Update: Bela’s comment (below) explains more about which character set you’ll actually get.

  • SQLEditor Cocoa B11a

    Unfortunately there was a crashing bug in SQLEditor beta 11 and I had to release b11a.

    It was one of these things were format strings caused the crash. I’d transposed two of the entries

    [NSString stringWithFormat:@” %@ %d”,aDecimal,aString]

    instead of

    [NSString stringWithFormat:@” %@ %d”, aString, aDecimal]

    and of course cocoa crashed, probably because it tried to send a message to the aDecimal variable.

    It’s unfortunate that this can’t be detected at compile time, because it’s really annoying and very easy to do.

    Possibly this could be caught in an exception handler of some kind though. I’ll have to do some more work on it.

  • SQLEditor Beta 9 Released

    Lots of fun new features in SQLEditor Beta 9.

    I think SQLEditor is getting quite close to the final release version actually, which is good.

    I have set up a new bug reporting and tracking system.