Planning an SQL or DBI plugin for Padre

Today I was looking around what kind of helper tools a Perl programmer might need, that is not necessarily for writing Perl code. One of the other fields we frequently visit is databases. We need to write SQL statements, looking into the structure and the content of databases and checking what are the values there, sometimes even designing a schema.

On one hand there are command line interfaces for every database and there are specialized desktop or web based tools to look at databases which are very powerful. So we might not need anything else.

On the other hand we have [dist://DBI], lots of DBD packages and a number of nice extensions of DBI for building code that can access databases. Maybe we can build some add-ons to Padre that will make our life even easier.

So I'd like your ideas on the subject. What kind of SQL or database related desktop tool would you like to have for your development?

Just to start the list, let me write down the trivial things I could come up with (trivial in thinking about them, not the development):

  • Probably the most basic feature is to provide SQL highlighting to the .sql files.
  • Then it would be nice to have call-tips explaining the various language elements
  • Statement completion would be also nice - once an SQL keyword is typed it should provide a list of keywords that can be used as the next thing (this should be either standard SQL or one of the SQL languages e.g. SQLite
  • Allow the user to define a connections string (database type, hostname, port, database_name (or filename), username, password) and connect to the database
  • Once a connection string is given, provide a drill down view of all the elements of the database (tables, index, stored procedures etc) and even the data
  • Allow the user to type in SQL statements (or mark one as selected text in the editor) and execute the query printing the results set on the output window
  • As extra feature somehow allow the use of this plugin for SQL statements embedded in Perl code and the execution of SQL statements that have placeholders. Is this doable at all?
  • Help to build a [dist://DBIx::Class] setup around the database.

What else ?