Exciting updates to SimpleDB Tool Bolso

Version 1.3 of my SimpleDB tool Bolso has been released today and it has some great new features. Firstly there is support for queries using SQL syntax which SimpleDB has recently begun supporting. The original query method is still supported in Boslo and Amazon.com says they’ll continue to support but not enhance the original query method for about 15 months.

The most interesting feature to ver. 1.3 is an enhanced data grid. One of the aspects of a standard data grid I never liked as it related to SimpleDB was that there could be more than one attribute with the same name but different values. For example an item could have an attribute name of ‘color’ with a value of ‘blue’ and also an attribute named ‘color with a value of ‘red’. Typically data grids expect each row/column cell to have one value. So in a standard data grid what to do? This is one of the reasons I created a tree view for viewing SimpleDB data in Bolso. So that it offered a different way of viewing the data that in some cases I think is more intuitive and easier to use. In this release I added an enhanced data grid that can better accommodate the SimpleDB feature of the same attribute name with multiple values. Now for each row and column all of the attribute values for a given attribute name will be displayed without additional columns.

The enhanced data grid also has in-place edit fields so that each attribute value can be modified simply by clicking the field and then saving the item attributes. This makes for quick editing of values especially if there’s a simple spelling error.

If you haven’t already tried using Bolso as an aid in exploring your SimpleDB contents then I suggest you give it a try. There’s also a tutorial page illustrating the usage of the various features.