Other Displays

Other displays are opened from the Database Explorer.

Displaying view definitions

When you display the information for a View you will see that there are two options: View Definition and View Definition (formatted).

View definition (free-format)

In most systems, the definition of a view is held as free-format SQL text. The menu option View Definition will show you this SQL text (for some databases the text is held as a number of lines; these lines are combined for this display).

However this display often isn’t very illuminating. If you are trying to understand how a view is defined you really want to know how the individual view columns are defined. View Definition (formatted) is an attempt to provide you with this information.

View definition (formatted)

When you select View Definition (formatted), AQT will get the view's SQL text then try and interpret it. It will decompose the SQL text into the individual columns then match this up with the view columns.

• The result is presented in a two-column grid with the view-column (on the left) and the source of that column beside it on the right.

• In addition, the WHERE clause is broken into components and displayed over several lines.

To demonstrate the use of this feature, run it against some of the system views.

Warning: This function works well for most of the views we have run it against. However there are limits to what it can do; if you have a particularly complex view then this display could fail or look quite strange.

Table access grid

This option applies to users of Oracle, Sybase Enterprise and MS SQL Server, and displays user's access rights in the same way as other databases, for easy comparison.

In the Database Explorer, when you display the information for a user, the Table Access Grid option is available from the listbox above the right-hand pane, or from the mouse quick-menu.

The table access grid runs a special program in AQT to display the user’s access rights in a easy-to-read format. This format has one row for each table the user has access to, and one column for each table privilege. The column privilege will be either N (does not have this privilege), Y (has this privilege), G (has this privilege with the Grant option).

You can switch to the Table Authorities view, which will show you the access rights in the “normal format” (the way this information is held within the catalog). You can flip between these two displays if you want to compare how they present the same information (however Table Authorities also shows Grantor, which is not shown in the Table Access Grid).