feature request or new product

Andrew HodgeAndrew Hodge Posts: 132
Currently use SQL Backup SQL Compare, SQL Data Compare and SQL Response and love the products

A useful tool that doesn’t seem to be well developed by anyone else or covered in your product range would be a BLOB editor for image and text columns that allowed for viewing, exporting and importing BLOB data. The viewer could allow selecting some standard file types (rtf, jpeg, pdf etc).

Comments

  • Hi,

    Thanks for you ideas. In order for us to consider this further we'd need to better understand the problem you're trying to solve. Can I ask you to describe the scenario that requires you to use such a tool?

    Thanks!

    David Atkinson
    Product Manager
    Red Gate Software
    David Atkinson
    Product Manager
    Redgate Software
  • ... A useful tool that doesn’t seem to be well developed by anyone else ...

    Not sure what you mean exactly with the expression "well developed". There is already an application covering this: http://www.sqlimageviewer.com/ ; however, if what you want is a full blow image editor then you should use a dedicated image application such as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop.

    Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
  • Thanks for pointing that software out, it is better than some of the other products I have seen. It still doesn't cover all eventualities though. We have things like .RTF .DOC etc stored in TEXT fields which this has mixed success in opening.
  • I take it you're wanting to use SQL Data Compare as a tool to explore your data, rather than a comparison tool? It sounds like an intersting idea.

    Can I ask why you need to view these Blobbed files? It's important for us to understand the root problem.

    David
    David Atkinson
    Product Manager
    Redgate Software
  • Hi David,

    This was why I wasn't sure if this feature request was actually a new product instead of a something that should be included in the SQL data compare tool.

    We have a number of applications which store documents (pdf, doc, rtf etc) and images in the text and images fields in SQL server.

    On a number of occasions we have had requests to extract/copy these documents and images out of the database and either modify or manipulate them. While we would expect the original application that loaded the image to the database to be able to do this we have had a variety of situations were the application has failed to be able to do this.

    One recent example is a user loads a very large file to the database ie an RTF file with embedded image at 45 MB. If we try to open the RTF in the loading application it times out and errors (I work for a local council and the quality of some of our application leaves something to be desired).

    As there are no native SQL tools to view the blob data we turn to 3rd party tools.

    I downloaded an application like the sqlimageviewer listed above and was able to export / view the RTF, see the issue with the size, modify it and import it again.

    As mentioned earlier in this thread the current 3rd party tools dont seem to be very well developed in my opinion. This was just an idea of a new product.
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