Saturday, 4 March 2017

Q-Eye Version 6.5 Release

New version of Q-Eye is available for download.

In this release we concentrated on making the life of end user easier.

Changes are:

  • Restructured Ribbon toolbar
  • Double click on the header renames field
  • Added Field Metadata Dialogue
  • Restructured metadata dialogue so it shows statistics: Total rows, Unique Values, Uniqueness, Null Count, Bit width, Size bytes ,XML type, Comments, Tags
  • Metadata dialogue's xml and file tabs are only shown to not yet modified documents
  • Generate LOAD Statement button was added to Metadata dialogue.
  • Ability to edit "generated load statement" was introduced
  • Added option to set number of rows
  • Added option to set number of columns
  • Added shortcut to insert row
  • Added shortcut to delete row
  • Added shortcut to insert column
  • Added shortcut to delete column
  • Improved column drag and drop functionality
  • Format button was renamed to fit to content
  • Software automatically adds rows when necessary
  • Lots of small but useful bugs fixes

Screenshot

 

About Q-Eye

Q-Eye is QVD files editor, It works with extremely large QVD files and consistently loads data faster than QlikView/QlikSense

Download Q-Eye

https://www.etl-tools.com/dmdocuments/QEye_32.zip https://www.etl-tools.com/dmdocuments/QEye_64.zip https://www.etl-tools.com/dmdocuments/qeye_portable.zip

Please support development of Q-Eye by donating

http://www.shareit.com/product.html?productid=300649422

Note: 
 If you want to automate working with QVD files we recommend using Advanced ETL Processor

Monday, 6 February 2017

Examples of bad software design


"As soon as an organization achieves significant market power, though, it's tempting for it to not listen any longer."

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/01/a-listening-device.html

A while ago I went to the Pentaho conference in London where Matt Casters, the developer of Pentaho Kettle said that he is going to run a session called "Pentaho Sucks". I thought what a s great example of how to make software better.

Unfortunately in real life I constantly seeing sales people running around and screaming "Our software is great".   They are unable to see the problems and unable to listen especially to the developers.

The developers do not buy the software, managers do
Here are some examples of bad and ignorant software design, I am not going to mention companies names so you can guess it yourself.

Saturday, 4 February 2017

Loading data from XML

Those who read our last post about loading data into ShopiFy are probably confused.
A lot of XML and XSLT what we're supposed to with that?

Today I will show how to load XML data into the database using Advanced ETL Processor.

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Extracting data from Shopify Part 1

"Once upon a time I was asked to provide assistance with extracting data from Shopify."

Background


Our customer company XYZ is based in US would like to use Advanced ETL Processor to connect to shopping platforms, such as Shopify, Big Commerce, Amazon and Volusion.

Extracting data from Shopify Part 2


Loading ShopiFy data into the database.  

Introduction

In the previous post we discussed extracting data from ShopiFy. Once data is extracted usually there is need to load it into the database. The data is extracted in XML format. I personally never understood obsession with XML. It seems to me that a lot of time organizations follow current trends and forget about common sense.

Consider following example:
 
<CustomerOrderMessage>
<OrderNumber>1</OrderNumber>
</CustomerOrderMessage>

The actual data here is just one byte the rest is of it just metatada. To process it we need more hardware which is good for hardware vendors. Some times XML is so complicated so you have to be a rocket scientist to understand it. That leads to errors and drives the cost up.
We have a wiki page dedicated to this topic: Advantages and disadvantages of working with XML
Simplicity is the answer.

Here is ShopiFy orders XML file example (part of it)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<orders type="array">
  <order>
    <id type="integer">3961189377</id>
    <email></email>
    <closed-at type="dateTime" nil="true"/>
    <created-at type="dateTime">2016-09-13T10:17:35-04:00</created-at>
    <updated-at type="dateTime">2016-10-03T14:24:15-04:00</updated-at>
    <number type="integer">4</number>
    <note>order for team</note>
    <token>8dfabd2504c936bb5da4bd00a406f6ba</token>
    <gateway>bogus</gateway>
    <test type="boolean">true</test>

The file is very complex and it has a hierarchical structure.

What we want to do is to convert it more readable format using XSLT