                                dbMetrix v0.1
                             by David E. Storey

Introduction

     dbMetrix is a copy-lefted, open-sourced SQL database tool. My goal
     is to write a very graphical, clean, consistent, modularized front
     end to various (currently opensourced) SQL servers. I plan to
     incorporate administration utilities, sql dumps, dbf2sql/sql2dbf
     and client support for all supported data sources. My motivation
     for writing dbMetrix is a current lack of nice, truely GUI SQL
     admin/client tools. Most of the tools available are written for a
     single, specific SQL server in mind and are usually only a GUI-fied
     text interface. dbMetrix supports multiple and various SQL servers
     simultaneously, however it is not a multi-threaded application.
     
Platform and source support

     The development platform I use is Linux. If you cannot get dbMetrix
     to compile on another platform, please let me know. I may be able
     to test things out under Solaris and DEC Unix, but I haven't quite
     gotten that far yet. If you couldn't compile something at first,
     but modified the source to make it work, please email me the patch.
     I'd love to incorporate it and give credit where credit is due! For
     now, the code is rather ugly. I'm working on this.
     
     dbMetrix can be obtained from:
     * ftp://ftp.tamos.net/pub/dbMetrix/

     dbMetrix homepage:
     * http://www.tamos.net/sw/dbMetrix/
       
Database support

     Currently, I like to think I support MySQL, mSQL and PostgreSQL,
     but I am heavily biased towards MySQL since that is my SQL server
     of choice. If I had access to client libraries and a server, I
     would add support for other data sources as well. I would like to
     add support for dbf files. The idea is to implement drag and drop
     support between any data sources for updating/copying tuples and/or
     data structures.
     
Graphical user interface support

     I use GTK because I like it, however, I'd like to think that I
     could write dbMetrix with multiple toolkit targets such as GTK,
     Motif and Qt. I'm taking a class in Computer Graphics this fall and
     I believe I will probably have to write a Motif Application. Looks
     like I'll get my chance to generalize the GUI and add
     Motif(Lesstif) support.
     
Current status

     My primary goal, for now, is to stablize the code base and come up
     with a better data source API. This is not to say that dbMetrix
     isn't usable. In fact, I use dbMetrix now over the current text
     based client. Once the API is done, I will worry about supporting
     more than just MySQL. I've decided to put in at least an hour of
     effort into dbMetrix per day, but that figure has recently grown so
     that I could push something out the door and get it in the hands of
     folks.
     
     I'm totally open to ideas. I wrote dbMetrix purely for myself and
     for some friends of mine that whine about the text based nature of
     unix. So now they should have nothing to complain about.
     
Requirements

     * GTK v1.0
     * MySQL (optional)
     * mSQL (optional)
     * PostgreSQL (optional)
     * Solid (optional)
