About

CristiData Xtractor has been designed and implemented by Cristian Scutaru, a software architect and developer with over 30 years professional experience. I’ve been working with relational databases for almost three decades and I was constantly unhappy with the relative limitation of those tools used to connect directly to a platform.

Yes, there are enough free open-source database administration tools, but none of them with the graphical interfaces and powerful features available in advanced spreadsheets. None lets you quickly design SQL queries, without writing one line of SQL or even knowing SQL. With automatic lookup fields and automatic drill-down through relationships, bottom page summaries and cell highlighting, various formats and many other powerful features.

I also looked for a very generic presentation and interfaces. Developers switch today from one database type to another, and we don’t want to use each time a different tool. We don’t necessarily enjoy either each time a different look and feel of the diagrams. We no longer want huge large diagrams we tape on a wall, when we could make them more comprehensible and modular. Model Xtractor is now your free tool for that.

There are so many vendor-specific features, extensions, gotchas and elements of surprise in any SQL implementation, that migrations and platform changes make you unproductive. Query Xtractor offers one single interface for any supported platform, and most similar queries have exactly the same populated fields, regardless of the vendor and actual generated SQL. We also fix on the fly many gotchas and truly help you getting productive. On platforms missing advanced SQL features, such as grouping sets, pivot crosstabs, intersect or except, sort with NULLs first or last, and way more, we simply emulate their support.

We provided generic support for most popular client-server, cloud and desktop relational databases, including some big-data platforms, with other few platforms still to come soon. We will soon support almost any kind of popular database, and go beyond the current relational domain. We already successfully experimented with support for NoSQL platforms, such as MongoDB or Redis, as well as JSON or XML.

One goal was to make you more productive in understanding data models and writing SQL queries. Another goal is to have an advanced and appealing graphical tool that allows you to connect directly to any relational database and beyond. And, with our tools, you no longer need to be an expert to understand data models and query directly a database.