What's new

AQT v9 is a significant redevelopment of AQT in the .Net environment. This gives AQT a modern platform; this provides a number of benefits plus will allow AQT to progress into the future.

As part of this change, we have implemented:

• a new grid component. This has a number of differences in behaviour, which are outlined in the following section.
• a new text-editing component. This provides a number of extra features, principally the ability to show a drop-down list of table names, column names, column functions or keywords when you are building a query in the Run SQL window.

Changes to Behaviour

The new grid component behaves differently than the grid used by AQT v8. For an description on how to use the grid, see Grid usability concepts. Differences with the v8 grid are:

• Selection. Cells can no longer be selected by dragging the mouse over cells. Instead you must click a cell, hold down Shift then select a second cell. All the cells between the two clicked-on cells will be selected.
• Hiding Columns. In the Data Display window, columns can no longer be hidden by dragging them "away". Instead, you must right-click the column and select Hide Column.
• Ungrouping Columns. In the Data Display window, you can group by a column by dragging the column to the group-by area at the top of the grid. This works the same as with AQT v8. To remove a column from the group-by area, drag it to somewhere outside the group-by area. The column will have a cross, which may indicate that you are dragging it somewhere invalid; however once you drop the column it will be removed from the grouping.
• Moving Rows. The grid doesn't have any in-built ability to move rows. In places where you need to do this, there will be buttons Move Up and Move Down.
• Filtering. Filtering is used when you use the filter box, or in the Data Display window when you use Edit > Find. Filtering is slow, so should be used with caution when you have a large amount of data.

New features of the new grid component are:

• Styles. You have flexibility of the style used for displaying your data. You can select between a number of in-built styles, or create your own.
• Column Totals. On the Data Display window, you can now get totals for numeric columns by clicking on View > Totals (Ctrl+T) or the Totals toolbar button.
• Printing. The grid has two different ways of printing the data - Print Data plus Generate Report. Print Data is a a basic print of the grid. The data Display window also has Generate Report, which gives more flexibility and styles of the printed data.

New Features

• New Appearance. Some of the windows have a slightly new appearance. The Database Explorer window, in particular, has had a number of changes to improve readability and functionality. This is described at Customizing the appearance.

  When you right-click an object in the middle grid, the dropdown now gives a more comprehensive set of options. You can go back to the v8 style of dropdown with View > Simple dropdown menus

• Charting. This is a major new feature, which allows you to create charts of your data. Once a chart has been created, it can easily be saved and reapplied to your data at a later time.
• Summarizing. There is a new window to make it easier to develop Summary queries on your data.
• New Text Editor component. We have implemented a new Text Editor, which is used by the Run SQL window, and the Manage Procedures and Manage View window.
  • this is component has Intellisense, which is the ability for AQT to display a dropdown list of tables, columns or function names as you type.
  • when writing Stored Procedures, Begin / End blocks are marked and can be collapsed
• Multiple Results on Run SQL and Query Builder Windows. Both these windows will now show multiple query results in a tabbed display at the bottom of the window.
• Pause Query. When AQT is displaying the result of a large queries, you can Pause and Resume the display. This is an alternative to the Get More Rows feature.
• Where Clause window. This window has a number of enhancements:
  • it is simpler and easier to use
  • it can now build sub-selects, including correlated sub-selects
  • it can now build an IN clause
  • it can be invoked from the Run SQL window with Ctrl+W

Options

We have made a lot of changes to the way Options are stored. This provides a number of benefits:

• Options can be exported and imported. This allows Options to be saved and moved between machines
• you can have different options for different databases and database types
• it is now much easier for system administrators to set a fixed option which cannot be changed by the end user

As a result of these changes, most options are now held in a different part of the registry than the v8 options:

• when you run AQT v9 for the first time, the v8 options will be migrated to the new v9 options
• after this point in time the two sets of options are separate. If you change an option in AQT v8, it will not be reflected in AQT v9 (and vica-versa).

Minor Enhancements

• External Editor. You can now use an external editor other than Notepad. The editor to use is specified in Options > General.

  Note that, in the Run SQL window, the Edit SQL using Editor function now works slightly differently. In the past it waited until the editor program ended. Now, you click on the Abort button for AQT to get the updated-SQL back from the editor.

• Query Builder. This now allows you to specify (simple) Where clauses on the Columns tab.

  As with the Run SQL window, you can now display query results on this window. This feature is turned on/off with View > DIsplay query results on this window.

  You can revert back to an earlier form of your query by right-clicking one of the query-results and selecting Revert to this query. This provides a basic undo capability for the Query Builder.

Some Technical Things

AQT now has:

• Improved multi-threading. AQT can now run more than one query at once, plus has improved ability to cancel queries. The AQT Cancel Queries task is no longer required.

  Note that AQT can only run a single query from each database connection. Most ODBC Drivers do not allow a single connection to run more than one query simultaneously.

• 64-bit support. AQT will have the ability to run as either a 32-bit application or as a 64-bit application. There will be separate AQT executables for each of these. This is important if you have 64-bit database clients. For more on this see Installing AQT on a 64-bit version of Windows.

  Note: the 64-bit version of AQT hasn't yet been completed.

• Full unicode support. Previously, there were some items (such as window captions and status bars) which were unable to display Unicode characters.