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With Mojave released and SQLEditor working, a new release with proper dark mode support is in the works. Development has been proceeding rapidly and there’s stuff to show off.

This screen shot shows some of the progress, see how the basic user interface is entirely dark mode.

It’s mostly finished, although I’m still working on how the drawing areas should appear. The first version has a white background for the drawing area, following the “diagram as image” idea.

A later revision may have the option to change this background color.

SQLEditor will offer the option to use either the system appearance or to explicitly choose either light or dark mode:

This work is mostly finished, currently it’s just being checked to make sure that all the details have been fixed and that no oddities remain.

Hopefully it should get a beta release fairly soon.

SQLEditor’s Django plugin now supports virtualenv. (New in 3.3)

It’s currently app wide, rather than per-document, which is coming soon as well.

Just open preferences and set the path to the python install inside the virtualenv and SQLEditor should be able to figure out what it needs from there.

NOTE: This specified python binary will be run by SQLEditor during the import, with standard permissions, so the python binary must be trustworthy.

I’m still working away on this, so more improvements soon hopefully

New in version 3.1.7 you can now change column (field) types across the whole document.

Use Menu->Edit->Refactor->Update Data Types

This has been requested for a while and is now available.

• Types are grouped so that varchar(100) is different from varchar(255).
• The search and replace ignores case, but is otherwise a simple search.
• The replacement type can be entered by hand by double clicking
• Or you choose an item using the small menu on the right

Hope this works nicely for everyone.

Let us know what you think: email us at support@malcolmhardie.com

Today SQLEditor 3.0.2 was released which offers some bug fixes, slightly better javascript error logging and new experimental Redshift support.

SQLEditor should now recognise the redshift JDBC drivers and it also has a redshift specific dialect.
Currently the dialect is absolutely identical to postgres, but further improvements are in development.
As a warning, it’s not really ready for prime time yet, and more testing is to be done.

Feedback is really welcome.

Download v3.0.2 (58MB zip)

I’m very pleased to announce that SQLEditor 3 has been released.

This new version is a major upgrade for SQLEditor that offers good improvements to our app.

The biggest change is the new single window interface. It means less screen clutter, it’s better in full screen mode and it’s more efficient on smaller screens.

The design report generator is a useful new feature to help with documentation of databases which is something that a lot of SQLEditor users do. It can be easily customised in Javascript.

The new plugin system allows SQLEditor to be easily extended in Javascript and allows entirely new export dialects. We hope to expand the possibilities for plugins in future point releases of SQLEditor 3.

Key Features

•  Streamlined single window user interface
• Design Report Generator
• Javascript Plugin System
• Performance improvements
• Better pre-flighting with more pre-flight actions
• New style options
• Plus other smaller improvements

The SQLEditor page has more details and I’ll be writing more about SQLEditor 3 soon.

Or download immediately via auto-update or our website

Today here is a sneak peak of the new user interface in SQLEditor 3 which is in development and will be released later in the year.

The improvements visible here are mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Single Window Interface

The biggest change is the single window interface. This seems to be the preferred design for apps these days, the floating palette approach seems to have fallen out of favour. This offers a major improvement on small screen devices and when in full screen mode. The palettes tended to get in the way a lot. There is a tradeoff on larger screens. Work is continuing on how to get the balance right.

The sidebars can be collapsed and you can hide the overview and palette sections entirely if you want:

Left Sidebar

The new left sidebar includes the overview at the top and the main sections below.
Both the labels panel and the status window have now been moved to the left sidebar.

Only status events relevant to the this document appear in its status panel.

The labels panel works as before:

Tree View

The tree view can now show tables grouped by schema as well as the previous flat view:

Right Sidebar

On the right side, the inspector takes the main space. Each window now keeps its inspector separately, so it is possible to  have several on screen at once. This makes things like copying text from one comment to another easier, because both text views will be visible at the same time.
The palette appears at the bottom and works as before.

Next Time

SQLEditor 3 has more exciting new features and improvements, which I’ll be writing more about as we get closer to the release date.

SQLEditor 3 is due later this year, pricing to be announced. 

Upgrades will be at a discount or free for recent purchases of SQLEditor

A new version of SQLEditor is released. Version 2.8.2 [56MB zip file]

Things of note in SQLEditor 2.8

The SQL parser has had quite a bit of work done on it for this release, which should mean fewer parsing oddities, particularly with keywords. This was originally reported as a bug involving the word ‘source’ as an identifier. You can now use ‘source’ as an identifier without problem. 🙂

There are several improvements to table renaming, and objects are better at preventing duplicated names.

Another significant improvement is the rewrite of the document state code. This handles things like when the document needs to be saved and when it is marked edited. Previously documents appeared as ‘edited’ immediately upon opening, but now they only appear as edited when they actually have been edited.

As part of the state change rewrite, undo for object properties should be more solid and label color editing should be more reliable.

There are also various other improvements and bug fixes.

Hopefully this should be a good release.

What happened to 2.8 and 2.8.1?

2.8 reached beta, but several bugs were identified, particularly in object naming and auto increment. These were fixed and 2.8.1 was released.

2.8.1 was a full release version, but a build issue caused two help files to be omitted from the build. This generated an exception when attempting to view them.

I’m happy to announce SQLEditor 2.7.1 (zip file, about 55MB). If you have automatic updates turned on, this update should appear the next time SQLEditor checks for updates.

As well as various bug fixes, this release also has a nice new feature where you can drag an entire SQLEditor document into another SQLEditor document and the contents will import everything in the first document into the second document.

You can also do this with SQL files and SQLite database files. In this second video I’ve got a SQLite database file and I drag it into the SQLEditor window. (Then I moved the second table a bit)

SQLEditor 2.7.1 (zip file) is available to download immediately.
It’s a free upgrade for all SQLEditor 2.x customers.

SQLEditor 1.x users can upgrade from 1.x at a good discount.

If you’ve been using SQLEditor recently, one thing you may have noticed is that the application download size increased in 2.2 from about 5MB or so, to nearly 60MB. This is because SQLEditor now bundles a complete Java VM in the application bundle, following current recommendations.

The main advantage of bundling a Java VM inside the app is that SQLEditor no longer needs Java installed on the system. (Assuming you’re running OS X 10.7.3 or later). This means no worries about installing and keeping java up-to-date. The bundled java obviously needs to be kept updated, but (a) that’s our problem now and (b) since we’re only using it in very limited ways, there shouldn’t be too much exposure.

You do still need to use a JDBC driver for the relevant database, and install this in the standard /Library/Java/Extensions directory.

SQLEditor 2.0.6 has just been posted onto the beta update channel, so if you have the “Check for beta Versions” option set you should get offered it the next time the app checks for updates. It will get pushed to the main site and the release channel in a day or so.

Or download SQLEditor 2.0.6 (5.7 MB zip file)

This version got a bit delayed, originally it was going to be 2.0.3, except that a whole collection of new bugs got reported, so it became 2.0.4. Then of course, a couple of the fixes failed during pre-release testing, so the number got bumped again (twice!). It is finally ready, though, and hopefully should fix a number of problems that were identified in 2.0.2.

Most of the problems were exceptions that were raised in odd circumstances, although it also fixes the parser to accept # as a single line comment prefix, and it makes some useful code improvements to the way that the document options window is managed. It also fixes the keyboard toggling of labels, which uses the CMD+{number} commands to hide or show labeled objects.

Hope you like it, and please do continue to report problems. It’s really appreciated!