Click for larger screenshotdbPAL Professional 3.0, $1,385
IT-Map International Ltd.
http://www.it-map.com
dbPAL is a database management program that truly deserves the word "unique." In fact, it's far enough off the beaten path that it's rather difficult to describe how it works; if you've got the bandwidth, I urge you to take a look at the movie below to get a sense of the dbPAL way of doing things. Basically, what you've got here is a drag-and-drop environment for working with database objects of various sorts. For example, one simple dbPAL operation is to extract the data from a database to a dataset file. To do this, you drag a database, a dataset file, a schema file, and a user to various spots on a dbPAL Workshop task, and then drag the task itself to a command area to execute it. If you're a keyboard person, this environment is likely to drive you crazy, but if you're a mouser at heart, you'll soon find yourself building up a library of tasks and objects that you drag and drop with abandon as you get your work done. Need to check up on the design of an object? Grab a saved schema and drop it on the Viewer. Time to migrate data from one database to another? That's just a matter of dragging both databases and the appropriate migration object into place.
Although you can master the basic interface quickly, there is an immense amount of flexibility and complexity here. For starters, dbPAL supports a whole mess of databases: Access, DB2, FoxPro, Interbase, SQL Server, Oracle, Paradox, and Sybase, to name a few. Within dbPAL you can work with these databases in two main areas, the Studio and the Workshop. The Studio is your home for schema engineering - it can, for example, work with a schema extracted from any supported database, and then turn around and apply that schema to any other database type (with automatic translation to the greatest extent possible). Alternatively, you can build up a schema from scratch and then apply it to a physical database. You can also define sub-Schemas to work with groups of objects within a database, and use migration objects to map between different schemas. The Studio also provides you with some schema-based reporting options.
The Workshop is where you get your hands dirty with actual database tasks. This is where you do things like extract the schema from a database, build DDL scripts, perform ETL activities, move data to and from legacy formats, and so on. As you work in the Workshop you'll find yourself creating dbPAL objects such as schemas and datasets which can be saved to disk for later reuse, and building them up into reusable tasks. You can even save an entire workshop session, complete with all of its tasks and results, for later reuse; this is ideal for setting up specific workbenches tuned for specific projects.
If you'd like to see dbPAL in operation, you've got a couple of options. First, you can download a 28-day trial version from the IT-Map Web site. Alternatively, if you work with MySQL, you can grab MYdbPAL. This is a special version that has all the functionality of dbPAL Professional, except that it will only update MySQL databases; it doesn't timeout, and you're welcome to use it as long as you like. Either way, you'll want to take a look at the tutorials to get started, as the learning curve can be a little steep at the beginning. But you may well find the end result quite addictive.
Click for larger screenshot
Click for animated movie (931
KB GIF made with
DemoCharge 2004)