[Qgis-developer] GSoC proposal: DBManager

[Ricardo Filipe Soares Garcia da]

Hi Guiseppe

I think it is great that you're willing to develop the Database manager idea :)

Me and Luiz Motta have been collaborating on the customDBQuery plugin,
which also allows for loading of spatial queries on the map canvas. It
takes a more minimalist approach than the other plugins, requiring
hand typing of the SQL commands, but it works with postgis and
spatialite. In fact you can't call it a manager at all. Still, I think
your suggestion is way better ;)

Codewise, I think that using the geoalchemy project[1] is probably a
great starting point in order to achieve specific DBMS independence.
It already has support for postgis, spatialite, mysql, oracle, and
MSSQL Server 2008. I have been wanting to get into it myself, but I'm
still learning sqlalchemy ;)

The code for the customDBQuery plugin is hosted at the new
hub.qgis.org, if you'd care to take a look at it.

As for suggestions, in addition to what you mentioned, I guess the
only comment I'd add is to try and keep the feature list to the more
common tasks for GIS users, as it is probably quite an effort to
develop a full and robust DB manager for lots of different backends.
Anyway, I support your proposal 100%.

[1] - http://www.geoalchemy.org/

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Giuseppe Sucameli <sucameli at faunalia.it> wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> I'd like to attend the GSoC 2011 as student to develop the following idea:
> http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011#Database_Manager
>
> Brief.
> I think PG_manager is a very useful plugin because permits users to get
> informations
> and run queries on a PG database from within QGis. Furthermore PG_manager
> GUI is
> very intuitive!
> So, at the HF in Pisa (2010.04) I starting to develop SL_manager, based on
> PG_manager but working on SpatiaLite databases. Unfortunately I didn't
> adapted the
> existent code to manage SL databases, instead I forked it.
>
> Now there're 2 different plugins based on the same code and it's very
> difficult
> maintaining both as porting fixes between them and adding new features could
> require a lot of time.
>
> There's another plugin based on PG_manager, it's the RT_Sql_Layer plugin
> which
> allow users to load a PG or SL layer using whatever select statement.
>
> Proposal.
> My aim is to merge both 3 plugins together and create the DB_manager plugin.
>
> First and the most important requirement, the DB_manager plugin *must* be
> easily
> expandable to manage different kind of databases (e.g. mysql, ...).
> I didn't look ahead when I forked PG_manager, but I want to correct my
> mistakes.
>
> Second, it should permit an easy management of databases, running common
> tasks
> as create/alter/delete tables, retrieve infos about tables, run queries, ...
> .
> Those are implemented in PG/SL_manager yet, but I have to do some changes to
> make them more general than they are.
>
> Third, DB_manager should allow to load tables as layer on the QGis canvas
> and,
> on the contrary, import layers from the canvas into the db.
>
> What is your opinion? Did I miss something?
> What other features would you like to see? And what other plugins (if any)
> would it be
> good to integrate in?
>
> Thanks for your comments.
>
> --
> Giuseppe Sucameli
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>
>



-- 
___________________________ ___ __
Ricardo Garcia Silva