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Joining across tabs

Please let us know if you are encountering problems with the beta or have ideas for how it can be improved. Please provide as much detail as possible so we can try to repeat the problem. Thanks!

Joining across tabs

Postby jonathan.hogg on Thu Aug 09, 2007 7:37 am

Perhaps I'm missing something here (technically or philosophically). The immediate thing I did when I opened Kirix was to bring up a couple of CSV files I had lying around. Sorting, filtering, grouping etc. all seemed fine within a particular tab, but the next thing I wanted to do was to construct a query across two tabs/sources. However, the query stuff only seems to work with tables I've pre-constructed in the project.

Now I guess this makes sense if you consider the thing to have been a desktop database first, and a data browser second, but the data browser bit will only be useful to me if I can do interesting things with multiple data sources. I tried out the import functionality, but that seems more permanent than I'm looking for and only works if you have the file - so presumably it wouldn't work with an HTML table.

What would be cool from my point of view, would be for the Project Tree, or something like that, to include tables you have open in tabs with some generated temporary name (presumably some mangling of the filename or web page title) that I could drag into a query just like a local table. That way you could query across temporary/remote sources and local data.

I can understand if this is difficult with the internal database engine, but presumably one could load the data into the Kirix equivalent of a temporary table.

Perhaps I can do all of this with JavaScript, but then I could just do it all in Python and not bother using Kirix.
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Re: Joining across tabs

Postby jonathan.hogg on Thu Aug 09, 2007 8:22 am

Hate to reply to myself, but I did some more digging and discovered this "mount" thing that allows you to add a folder to your project. I did that for a folder full of CSV files and it appeared like it would do what I wanted. I dragged a database table from a SQL Server source and a CSV file from this mount and tried a query joining the two, but I got an error message saying "Failed" without any particular reason why. I tried a query with two CSV files with the same result.

[As an aside, the errors aren't particularly obvious - it took me a moment to figure out that there had been an error rather than it just ignoring me. Also, the Alt-Enter or right-click-"Execute" thing doesn't seem very intuitive for running a query - why isn't there just a Run button?]
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Re: Joining across tabs

Postby Aaron on Thu Aug 09, 2007 10:42 am

jonathan.hogg wrote:I dragged a database table from a SQL Server source and a CSV file from this mount and tried a query joining the two, but I got an error message saying "Failed" without any particular reason why. I tried a query with two CSV files with the same result.

You're spot on with what you're trying to do. Kirix Strata is designed to let you combine data from different sources like this - we simply haven't ironed out all the problems yet. We'll be releasing several iterations of the beta version, and this particular issue will likely be addressed within the next 3 weeks.

jonathan.hogg wrote:Also, the Alt-Enter or right-click-"Execute" thing doesn't seem very intuitive for running a query - why isn't there just a Run button?

The toolbar items will also be revised. We've had requests for a variety of different toolbar buttons, including a refresh button and a home button. Of course, we can't add every possible button because it would complicate the interface; but we're hoping that with this kind of feedback, we'll be able to make the best choices.

#116, #138
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