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Hi Anakic, this looks great! I've been having to use SQL in Excel a lot lately, through ADO (VBA). I've been using it to create prepared operations; users clic

by jpau 11y ago

Hi Anakic, this looks great! I've been having to use SQL in Excel a lot lately, through ADO (VBA). I've been using it to create prepared operations; users click a button and, for example, Excel will generate a list of clients that are in two different Workbooks. Am I right in saying that the advantage that ThingieQuery has over what's already in Excel is that a REPL-esque nature allows you to run these commands on the fly? Can you maybe expand a bit more on the comparison?

anakic 11y ago
Yeah, that's a big one. Being able to use it in a REPL-esque manner without much ceremony is one nice thing. It also has other features you would expect from a SQL IDE: - syntax highlighting - code completion - partial query execution (select part of the query to execute only that part) It focuses on tables instead of sheets, so you don't have to clean up content around your data, since your data is clearly marked inside tables. You can combine your Excel data with data from an external database, and actually use the external database to process the data. If needed you can easily insert the excel data into permanent tables in the external database. And you can write query results anywhere in Excel. It integrates really well with Excel, you can update existing tables from a result and it will match the table and the results by headers, and only update what it matches. It won't overwrite any calculated columns or formatting. It will push content up or down to make room for new data instead of overwriting it. Also the SQLite engine that procesess the data is augmented with many .NET functions as well ("format" function is basically String.Format, "replacex" is Regex.Replace, and there are other added functions), and in the future I will be opening it up for the user to add their own .NET functions (imagine using functions for ldap querying, statistics, math, other specific fucntions from your SQL commands). There is a lot of fun stuff for really advanced users, and I'll be making tutorials and opening it up for customization as much as I can. Well, I've already written a wall of text so I'll stop here:) Antonio

by jpau 11y ago

anakic 11y ago

Yeah, that's a big one. Being able to use it in a REPL-esque manner without much ceremony is one nice thing. It also has other features you would expect from a SQL IDE: - syntax highlighting - code completion - partial query execution (select part of the query to execute only that part) It focuses on tables instead of sheets, so you don't have to clean up content around your data, since your data is clearly marked inside tables. You can combine your Excel data with data from an external database, and actually use the external database to process the data. If needed you can easily insert the excel data into permanent tables in the external database. And you can write query results anywhere in Excel. It integrates really well with Excel, you can update existing tables from a result and it will match the table and the results by headers, and only update what it matches. It won't overwrite any calculated columns or formatting. It will push content up or down to make room for new data instead of overwriting it. Also the SQLite engine that procesess the data is augmented with many .NET functions as well ("format" function is basically String.Format, "replacex" is Regex.Replace, and there are other added functions), and in the future I will be opening it up for the user to add their own .NET functions (imagine using functions for ldap querying, statistics, math, other specific fucntions from your SQL commands). There is a lot of fun stuff for really advanced users, and I'll be making tutorials and opening it up for customization as much as I can. Well, I've already written a wall of text so I'll stop here:) Antonio