the business of technology blog
What’s in your toolkit?
December 2nd, 2011 @ 04:24pm
It used to be that we needed to carry around our box of 5 1/4″ floppys with all of the possible utilities that we’d need for a given day’s development work. That gave way to 3 1/2″ disks, CD’s, and now our own laptops, tablets, and flash drives. At this point I find that when working with customers, I can most often use my laptop which gives me access to the myriad of tools which I’ve acquired over the years. Still, sometimes, there will be situations where you’re constrained to be only within the client’s environment and your machine cannot be used. Even in those circumstances, you can usually plug in a flash-drive to exchange files.
So that all leads me here: sometimes you want to look at a database but cannot get access to the appropriate client. It just isn’t installed on the machine that you’re using, and you can’t remote to any machine that has it either. Enter “Query ExPlus“. This is a wonderful, self-contained 176K executable which lets you connect to SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, and OLEDB databases. This tool is like a mini-SQL Management studio and the real beauty of it is that you can run it from a flash drive! There’s no installation required. Granted, it isn’t as fast or fully-featured as OEM front-ends, but it is a real life-saver when those tools aren’t available.
Query ExPlus is an Open Source application available on SourceForge here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/queryexplus/ as such, there’s minimal documentation and only community support is available.
I highly recommend you keep this one handy for the times when you just have to peek into that database but can’t, or don’t want the overhead of installing SQL Management Studio or another heavyweight DB UI.