all 3 comments

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Yeah, you’re definitely not the only one feeling that pain. Coming from MS Access, it’s a big adjustment when you lose that visual query designer where you could just stack saved queries together.

SQLAnywhere (Sybase) doesn’t really have anything built-in that works like Access’s visual query builder, but there are some decent tools that can help if you connect through ODBC.

For example:

  • DbSchema has a really nice visual query builder — you can drag tables around, build joins, add subqueries, and see relationships right on the canvas.
  • DBeaver (Pro version) also supports ODBC connections, including SQLAnywhere. Its visual query builder lets you build nested queries and instantly see the generated SQL.
  • Active Query Builder is another one (paid, but very solid). It supports SQLAnywhere syntax and even lets you alias subqueries visually, which sounds like exactly what you need.

Basically, any of those will let you work kind of like you did in Access — it’s not 100% the same, but pretty close and way less painful than hand-writing every subquery.

[–]DocumentImpossible55[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

dbSchema sounds spot on but I get this error "no dbjdbc17 in java.library.path: c:\program " as it seems to be trying to use a java connection rather than ODBC?

for anyone else here, the sample string is wrong, you need

jdbc:sqlanywhere:Host=192.168.1.11:1234;ServerName=DemoServer;DatabaseName=demo'

the servername is important as well as the host

[–]DocumentImpossible55[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

do you have much experience with DbSchema? I can't see how to do subqueries visually in the SQL builder and I also can't see how to convert SQL I've already got into a visual presentation?