[seek-dev] Desktop SQL Tools is MS Office (std) and Open Office (RE: SQL db candidates for data query)

[Steve Tekell]

This may be a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to point out that if
someone just wanted a way to load a text file or other data files and run
SQL queries against then there is a way to do this without writing any
application.

That is, both Microsoft Office and Open Office provide this functionality.
Moreover, they provide visual query designers as an alternative to writing
the raw SQL.

This might not be useful for anything that you are trying to do now, but
Open Office is free, so it's possible.  And it might come in handy for
something.

I haven't worked with this in Open Office so much, but open a spreadsheet,
go to Tools -> Data Sources and You will see that you can choose MySQL,
ODBC, JDBC, Text and more.  Then you can use the designer to create/execute
SQL queries and toggle between design view and raw SQL.

Also, in the past, I have integrated desktop office apps into an enterprise
application so that users could have sophisticated ways of manipulating data
without me having to try futility to do provide an equally robust GUI in a
web app.  We would just write scripts that would get/submit data to/from the
enterprise application from within Office.  That is, weren't using Office to
connect directly to a database, but rather interfacing with our business
logic tier.  You could use XML, formatted text, serialized objects, etc.

Anyway, just wanted to point out this functionality.  I think a lot people
may not know it's there, especially in Open Office.  They assume you need to
get Star Office or MS Office Pro which include their own databases to get
this functionality.

Steve