Data Xtractor Blog

Alternatives to Pie Charts, with FREE Cheat Sheet Infographic

If you are wondering about alternatives to Pie charts you may use, here is a detailed reference, with a short checklist for every transition to an equivalent or similar chart type. At the end, we share a cheat sheet infographic you may use for your projects.

We limited this post to a typical single-series Pie chart with a small acceptable number of slices, having all values already sorted in descending order. Other specific Pie chart types, with just two slices, or with multiple side-by-side or nested pies, may be considered separately in another post.

Detect Overlapping Intervals

Let’s see how Query Xtractor can help you solve the typical SQL problem of detecting overlapping datetime intervals. We have a table of projects employees are working on for a period of time, between a start and end date. It is indeed very hard to figure out from the results grid how large each period of time is and how they compare to each other.

Why BETWEEN is error prone

We do not use BETWEEN for now, and chances are we’ll never expose it as a direct operator in our query builder. Sure, there are pros and cons on using x BETWEEN a AND b rather then x >= a AND x <= b, and that’s one reason why we have this article. However, assuming our tool tries to avoids as much as possible error prone SQL constructs and the “element of surprise”, it seems like the bad won over the good. (more…)

Planning for Database Migrations

Many project managers, database administrators, system architects or software developers experience at least once in their lifetime the perspective of a database migration. Your company acquired Oracle and you want to see if your SQL Server based application cannot be easily switched to Oracle. Or to an open-source client-server database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. Or, for a small application with no justification for such large resources, you want to check the cost of migrating all your queries to SQLite or Firebird. (more…)