Goat Universal JDBC Viewer

Goat is essentially a universal JDBC Viewer/Editor. Every major database today supports JDBC, and most of them come with their own set of tools to view / modify data. The impetous behind creating goat was to have an unified interface to simplify viewing and managing data irrespective of the underlying database.

Note that goat does not intend to replace the existing tools to manage any given database, [since most of them contain database specific commands which are not cross-platform compatible] but to provide a common denominator to view and manage data.

In addition to providing an easy to use interface, goat also has some useful features (query completion, smart query generation, schema export/import etc) which can help both database administrators as well as java developers to manage data easily.

Goat contains a host of features in a very small package. The base package of goat is less than 3 MB in size [including it's html based help system]. Since all of the features were coded in the app, there are no dependencies on external libraries other than the base JDK.

Code Completion & Syntax Highlighting.
Export/Import of schema and data as HTML/CSV/XML.
Allow Multiple database connections.
Dynamic Driver Class Loading to avoid application restart when changing drivers.
Auto-Connection mechanism can automatically connect to all databases on start
Ability to render Clob/Blob data as text, images or XML.
Allows searching through clob data for matching text.
Update Dialog allows creating dynamic update queries
Update of all fields - including blobs/clobs possible via Update Dialog
Plugin mechanism allows creating customizable viewers for data
Graphical Relationship management tool
SQL Generation mechanism to generate sql queries easily
Import Mapping allows users to customize importing data from other databases

and many more.....

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. I am getting an java.lang.AbstractMethod error when i try to use my driver ?
A. This is probably because the application was trying to execute a method present in the JDBC api which was not available in your driver. Goat assumes that the jdbc drivers being used support the JDBC 2.0 api. Contact your driver vendor to get a driver which supports JDBC 2.0.

Q. Why do i get the text "Warning !!! : <message text>" in my consle when I run goat ?
A. Goat expects the jdbc driver which is being used to display the database information be fully JDBC 2.0 compliant. Unfortunately however that is not the case with all the drivers. This message is displayed on the console when goat tries to execute a JDBC 2.0 method which is not supported by the driver. In most cases goat will try to use an alternative method to execute the task (which will be much slower than the time taken than the right JDBC 2.0 method) and continue forward without interruption. However sometimes it might not be possible to continue on because of driver limitation, in which case an error dialog will be displayed to the user with the correct exception.

Q. The "Smart Query" feature is generating incorrect queries.
A. "Smart Query" is designed to work only for simple queries. If you have complex queries containing joins/intersection/inner queries/inline views etc it is not guaranteed to work correctly.

Q. Can I use Native JDBC Drivers (eg. ORACLE OCI) with Goat ?
A. If your native drivers support JDBC 2.0, yes you certainly can use them. However there is one extra step to perform before you can use them. The native drivers typically require DLL's in the system path to be present before they can be used. So you will have to manually include them in your PATH before you can use them inside Goat. Otherwise you might get "UnsatisfiedLinkError " when you try to connect to your database using these drivers.

Q. Somestimes in relationship view I can only view the table structures, not the lines representing the relationship
A. The most common reason this happens is if you do not have both your catalog and schema selected in the Item list pane.