Friday, August 6, 2010

VoraX 2.0

VoraX has changed its major version number. Ieeei... waves please! :) It feels a little bit more mature, doesn't it? Joking apart, this new release addresses a few nasty bugs and it has some nice new features.

The first one is the ability to store passwords for your Oracle connection profiles. For those of you who's working with a lot of databases and users this feature may prove to be a life saver. Shaun Batterton came up with this idea and he proposed the using of PGP protocol. However, in ruby PGP is not very well supported. There is a project called OpenPGP but I found difficult to use it on windows because of its dependency on Open4 which is not supported on Windows. In the end I gave green light to the RSA keys implementation and you may find additional details about this here.

Shaun also noticed that the fact that after a connection you have to set the [no name] buffer to an sql buffer type it's quite annoying. And he's right, that's why in VoraX 2.0 a scratch.sql buffer is opened on the first connection.

Then Spratek had also a nice improvement idea. Instead of the flat DESC output he (he I guess :D) came up with the idea of a more verbose describe. The idea is to have also comments for columns, constraints, foreign keys and other such critical information for database developers. So, VoraX 2.0 has also this feature. For a table or a view you may invoke a verbose describe using <Leader> vdv mapping.

Also, in VoraX 2.0 you may invoke describe and "go to definition" directly within the results window. This might be handy if you query dictionary stuff and you want to describe a definition directly from that output.

That's it for the moment! Have fun guys!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Alexandru,
I'm trying to get VoraX to work on Vista but haven't been able to get the browse window to display.
I'm on Vista Enterprise SP 2.
GVIM 7.2 working.
ruby l.87 loaded.
antrl3 gem loaded.
win32-api gem loaded.
oracle client and sqlplus working.

from within gvim, when I do
:VoraxConnect user@DB

it connects successfully.

I see two windows: top one has __scratch__.sql
bottom one says vorax-results.
I get output from target Oracle system with Connected. and the banner info.

But no frame on the right allowing me to browse database objects.

Am I missing VIM plugins?

thanks!
Ben

DanyC said...

Hey Alex,

Nice work, congrat. I'm planning to give it a go but before that, does VoraX provide the functionality to recall last few commands executed in the same way like rlwrap?

Well done and keep going.

Cheers,
Dani

Unknown said...

Hello!

I was looking for an easy replacement of SQLDeveloper and found your IDE rather interesting.
As I'm beginner in VIM, I'd need your help:
How can I invoke a command like VoraxDbExplorer. What

I've found in the sources is the mapping to some
vv

Could you tell me (and all other n00bs) what should?

Norbert

Unknown said...

What I've found out is, that leader is backslash by default :D, but still no luck...

What also annoys me is the oracle timeout. Maybe it has nothing with VoraX, but when I want to access the DB after some 15 minutes of inactivity, let's say, open a table definition, the "BusyIndicator" keeps spinning and nothing happens....

Unknown said...

Okay, now it works (had to set the vim mappings in vorax.vim for myself).

VoraX is cool!

Alexandru Tică said...

Hi everybody, and sorry for this late response:

Ben: if you still have troubles with VoraX on Vista just open an issue at: http://code.google.com/p/vorax/issues/list
The DbExplorer is not shown by default but you may invoke it by using [Leader] vv. Check vorax documentation for additional details.

DanyC: VoraX is not quite a command line tool therefore it doesn't have a similar history feature like rlwrap provides. If you'd like VoraX to have history you may propose it on http://code.google.com/p/vorax/issues/list and we can talk there how this should look like.

Zitbag: glad to see you succeeded after all. The DbExplorer may be opened using [Leader] vv. By default the leader key maps to "\" but you may change it if you like. I personally use "," instead of "\". There's a post on this blog about some useful vim settings in connection with VoraX. As far as the timeout issue is concerned you may open an issue and we can track it from there if you think that you find a bug.