Work has been crazy lately, for the past few months. I believe this has been due to a large increase in business while our workforce remains the same size.
So, my job title is "Software Engineer" currently, and I do write a good amount of software when I'm not consumed by a myriad of other tasks. For instance, most recently I was putting together capital requests for new equipment, which isn't hard but is certainly not interesting.
I've talked about this before briefly, but my coworker is the lead on some test automation software we use and I help out with that sometimes.
Most of the code that I am involved with is for some applications that I have written which deal predominantly with the data that is taken, and my DB on the backend. The most popular of which analyzes data vs some set limits and determines passing conditions etc.
Another program that I have which I use very freqently I just call dbBrowser. This can connect to one of my databases, either the massive network version or standalone SQLite files, and pretty much just query data.
Yep..just query data. It uses a grid structure to build queries, which all-in-all is a pretty simple function (although under the hood the queries are pretty complex because of the structure of the db and all that).
This tool is invaluable to me when I am searching for data, or just something as simple as looking for a correct parameter name. I can also dump data to a csv file, or load in saved queries (which comes in handy because my other program "AutoSpec" can output one of these saved queries as a debug measure).
So yeah, I love this thing. I kind of don't really care for the UI though, so over time I have been changing it slightly, and most recently I added some filtering.
On the down side, the grid controls I am currently using are not open source, they are licensed as "distribuable only with executable" or something similar to that. However, it is a very well-made control made by a bright guy (see nxsoftware.com).
Since it is not open or free, I may look into changing this a bit to something less feature-intensive but can serve the same purpose and that I have written myself.
Then I can open source this guy if anyone wishes to use it. Odds are, not, but it's good for the code to be free. Even though it is written in purebasic :-p
Assuming I can actually get some time in to do some coding...recently I have been having to do it on my own time late at night!
Tags: #work #purebasic #dbb
