SQLite Maestro 14.3 released

Mar 12, 2014

SQL Maestro Group is happy to announce the release of SQLite Maestro 14.3, a powerful Windows GUI solution for SQLite server administration and database development. Please consider the list of new features implemented in this version since the last official release:

Server management extensions:

• SQLite Maestro has been successfully tested with the recent SQLite versions. The latest available library (3.8.4.1) is now included into the installation package (special thanks to the wxSQLite3 team).
• Support for tables without RowID (SQLite 3.8.2) has been implemented. By default, every row in SQLite has a special column, usually called the "RowID", that uniquely identifies that row within the table. There are sometimes space and performance advantages to omitting this column. To create a table without the "RowID" column, check the appropriate option in the Create Table Wizard. Please note that using this feature causes binary incompatibility at the database level i.e. an attempt to open a database that contains one or more WITHOUT ROWID tables using an earlier version of SQLite will result in a "malformed database schema" error.

  Picture 1. Create Table Wizard: Without RowID option

• Starting from this version it is possible to create named primary key, foreign key, and check constraints for both newly created and existing tables. It is also possible to rename existing constraints.

  Picture 2. Support for named constraints

• Support for various data storage modes for columns of date, time, and datetime data types has been added. The following formats are now supported:

  Format	Data types	Example
  ANSI SQL (default)	date, time, datetime	2014-03-05 19:48:15
  Julian datetime	date, time, datetime	2456722.325173611
  Unix time in seconds	date, datetime	1394048895
  Unix time in microseconds	date, datetime	1394048895000000
  Number of seconds	time	25
  Number of microseconds	time	25000000

  To instruct SQLite Maestro how to read and write values of these data types, select the appropriate options in the Edit Database Profile dialog.

  Picture 3. Database Profile: Storage options

• Support for table-level unique constraints has been implemented. You can create new unique constraints, change existing ones as well as delete the constraints.

  Picture 4. Index Properties: Unique constraint

• Get SQL Dump wizard has been significantly updated:
  • Now it is possible to rename output columns in the result SQL script. To set a new target column name, enter a value to the Target column in the grid at the first step of the wizard.
  • You can also change the order of output columns using the appropriate commands of the popup menu or Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down shortcuts.

    Picture 5. SQL Dump: target column order

  • Starting with this version it is possible to specify the SQL syntax the result script to be written on. This feature allows you to restore the dump contents to a table in a different database server such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, or Firebird.

    Picture 6. SQL Dump: setting SQL syntax

• Scripts generated on changes of metadata that require the table to be recreated have been optimized. This should be quite useful for editing tables with large amount of data as the changes are now applied up to 2 times faster.
• From now on SQLite Maestro alerts about potential data loss in child tables when recreating a parent table. This can occur if the parent table has one or more foreign key references created with ON DELETE CASCADE. This warning may be disabled at the Confirmations tab in the program settings window.

  Picture 7. Warning displayed on changing table metadata that can cause data loss

Interface improvements:

• Nullable Column Checker has been implemented. This feature allows you to refactor your database schema by enforcing omitted NOT NULL constraints. It is useful, for example, if you have got a legacy schema with a lot of columns allowing NULL values and plenty of data. To invoke the wizard, use the appropriate link in the Generate SQL section of the table popup menu at the Explorer tree.

  Picture 8. Nullable Column Checker

• Data Import features:
  • Starting with this version it's possible to import data from several files at a time. To import data from multiple files with the same structure, set the mask of the file names to the corresponding field. To see the list of matching files, use with the button on the right.

    Picture 9. Import data from multiple files

  • The Column Builder for text files with fixed column width has been redesigned. Now to set the correspondence between table columns and areas of a text file, you can either input offset and width for each column directly into the controls, or define these values by clicking the left mouse button in the right area of the tool.

    Picture 10. Column Builder for text files with fixed column width

  • Now it's possible to add current timestamp to the log file name using the %ts:TIMESTAMP_FORMAT% string template. Examples of valid datetime formats are: 'YYYY-MM-DD', 'YYYY-MM-DD-HH24-MI', 'YYYY-MM-DD-HH24-MI-SS', and so on.
  • Now each time you start the wizard to import data to a table it stores all the options as them were set on the previous session of working with this table.
• Data Export: Support for Json file format has been implemented.

  Picture 11. Data Export to JSON

• Data Grid features:
  • The headers of required columns are marked with a red asterisk.

    Picture 12. Data Grid: required column

  • To reset all grid settings to defaults, open the Data tab when holding the Ctrl key.

In addition to this, several bugs have been fixed and some other minor improvements and corrections have been made.

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