Chapter 7. Your Dad Had a Workbench, Now So Do You: SQL Workbench

When I was a kid, I'd go into my dad's tool closet and take out a bunch of his tools, find the nearest electronic device, and proceed to take it apart. This didn't always make my parents too happy but at least they can rejoice in the fact that my son and daughter are doing the same thing on occasion to me! Looking inside something and figuring out what makes it tick is part and parcel of what we do as software developers, and just plain human beings. High-level abstractions and descriptions are often all we need, but diving into the nitty-gritty details is at other times exactly what we need.

We've been using Gears throughout this book, the database portion of it at least, but being able to peer into the databases themselves, unless you use the SQLite Manager add-on for Firefox, isn't something within our power. In this chapter we'll create an application that aims to alleviate that shortcoming!

We'll build ourselves an application called SQLWorkbench, and in the process we'll see a few new things in Ext JS. By the end of this chapter we'll have a handy tool that will prove valuable when we're using Gears for local database storage.