Carlos Sierra's Tools and Tips

Today, we are very happy to release SQLdb360, a new tool that merges together eDB360 and SQLd360, under a single package.

Tools eDB360 and SQLd360 can still be used independently, but now there is only one package to download and keep updated. All the new features and updates to both tools are now in that one package.

The biggest change that comes with SQLdb360 is the kind invitation to everyone interested to contribute to its development. This is why the new blended name and its release format.

We do encourage your help and ideas to continue building a free, open-source, and hopefully a YMMV great tool!

Over the years, a few community members requested new features, but they were ultimately slowed down by our speed of reaction to their requests. Well, no more!

Few consumers of these tools implemented cool changes they needed, sometimes sending us the changes (or pull requests) until a later time. This means good ideas were available to others after some time. Not anymore!

If there is something you’d like to have as part of SQLdb360 (aka SQLd360 and eDB360), just write and test the additional code, then send us the pull request! Next, we will review, validate, and merge your code changes to the main tool.

There are several advantages to this new approach:

1. Carlos and Mauro won’t dictate the direction of the tool anymore: we will continue helping and contributing, but we won’t “own” it anymore (the community will!)
2. Carlos and Mauro won’t slow down the development anymore: nobody is the bottleneck now!
3.  Carlos and Mauro wan’t run out of ideas anymore!!! The community has great ideas to share!!!

Due to the nature of this new collaborative effort, the way we now publish SQLdb360 is this:

1. Instead of linking to the current master repository, the tool now implements “releases”. This, in order to snapshot stable versions that bundle several changes together (better than creating separate versions per merge into master).
2. Links in our blogs are now getting updated, with references to the latest (and current) stable release of SQLdb360 (starting with v18.1).

Note: Version names sound awfully familiar to Oracle nomenclature, right? Well, we started using this numbering back in 2014!!!

Carlos & Mauro