Oracle and Open Source

gASQL

In addition to working on GNOME-DB, Vivien Malerba is contributing to an embryonic project with Gerhard Dieringer called gASQL. The gASQL application is a GTK+-based relational modeling tool that works with all of the GNOME-DB compatible databases, including, of course, Oracle. gASQL graphically represents an entity relationship diagram (ERD) of the tables in your database. It provides you with an easy-to-understand view of your tables and their primary keys, foreign keys, and sequences.

Tip

In order to demonstrate gASQL’s database independence (and for some variety), we’ve used the PostgreSQL database for the examples in this section.

The main web site for gASQL is:

http://gasql.sourceforge.net

Installing gASQL

gASQL is an application based on GNOME-DB, so refer to the GNOME-DB section for preliminary installation information. Actually, GNOME-DB is the hard part. After you finish installing it, you’ll have all the libraries and associated software you need installed. You can install gASQL from source or use an RPM as we did.

If you do decide to install from source, follow the basic format of other source-based installations. Here is an outline:

1. Download the source code from http://gasql.sourceforge.net.

2. Expand the tar file:

   $ tar xvzf my_code.tar.gz

3. Build the Makefile:

   $ cd my_code
   $ ./configure

4. Run make to build libraries and executables:

   $ make

5. Install the libraries and executables in the proper directories on your system. You must be the root user to perform this step:

   $ cd /path/to/my_code ...