Empowering the Novice SQL User

Published by Cristian Scutaru on

Here is a typical example on using Data Xtractor, to empower the novice SQL user and give more freedom to the database administrators and developers. Assist the clerk on features not-implemented yet by their financial system or other database application…

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There’s no App for Everything

Lynda from Accounting is frustrated with the rigid structure of her huge financial application. She frequently finds bills and invoices where she needs more related data which is hard to find and navigate to.

Developers do not have the budget or financial justification to implement all possible use cases. So she frequently bothers Larry, her database administrator, with individual tokens and SQL queries he has to manually write. Time consuming and lots of frustration for both…

Enter Safe Data Xtractor

Bought one license for Lynda, installed on her computer. Smooth instant installation for an affordable price.

Larry enters the credentials to connect remotely to his Oracle database. What’s nice is it’s recommended but he doesn’t even need to give Lynda a very restrictive account! Because everything is anyway read-only. The application cannot alter any data or metadata on a database. And it can generate just read-only SELECT queries, using eventual functions that cannot modify data.

Also, those credentials can be saved within the local database, but they are hidden from the end-user. Larry may leave it this way to Lynda, because she will never know what password Larry used to connect.

Easy to Configure

The app automatically imported required metadata and created a bunch of models and demo queries. Larry adjusted quickly some simple diagrams, from which even those who never heard about the entity-relationship model or relational databases could quickly understand the concept of tables and related data.

Larry may design as well (not write!) some queries, but Lynda will be the one to actually build more queries, interactively and in graphical mode, when required. Larry makes sure most table relationships are represented, and eventually creates on-the-fly some client-side custom joins, to help Lynda later walk easily through new relationships, with drill-downs.

Categories: Case Study

Cristian Scutaru

I designed and implemented the Data Xtractor suite, with Model Xtractor, Query Xtractor, and Visual Xtractor as separate modules. I am 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, and instantly extract and display data in flexible ways.