Coding / Scripting & SQL

Hey guys,

I am in the very early stages of my scripting / coding (not even sure what you call it, LOL!) journey.

Currently I’m learning SQL for a project I am working on.

I remember in a previous episode (I can’t remember which one), Rosemary & David spoke about an app for scripting which is great for error handling. From memory it had a ladybug / beetle (or something similar)… Am I way off here? Any ideas?

It may have been Script Debugger by Late Night Software - it has a ladybird/ladybug icon (though many debuggers also include a beetle/bug image). However, that is for AppleScript.

If you want a more generic text editor for code editing, SublimeText, BBEdit, Nova and Visual Studio Code have all had references at one point or another I think, and they would support SQL editing, sytax highlighting and potentially some linking, but that isn’t the same as debugging.

The core SQL language (I suspect it is still ANSI SQL) is not procedural, it is just a query language, which means you cannot step through code like you do in code debuggers. You have to analyse the code manually. However, if you are using a flavour of SQL with procedural elements (T-SQL), then I guess there may now be debugger options out there to help with that, but unfortunately I don’t deal day to day with transactional SQL coding any longer, and always used to do it by hand and eye back in the day.

1 Like

Beat me by 2 minutes!!! :rofl:. I basically was preparing all those same links!

Thanks so much @sylumer and @motopascyyy

If you are learning SQL, can I recommend Datasette?

It’s free. There’s a Macc app and it’s a great way to explore a dataset. You can use it with a collection of csv files, or actual databases.

I’ve worked with databases on and off since last century, including with some pretty powerful tools, and I still find Datasette one of the most pleasant ways to play around with data.

1 Like