AQT is created by a New Zealand software company, Cardett, and is distributed and supported through the Internet. AQT is designed for use by database administrators and developers.
AQT is a Windows application that uses ODBC to access the data, but is aware of the catalog structures of most common databases. This sets it apart from most software tools that use ODBC. The ODBC catalog is very slow on large systems, but AQT directly queries the catalog meta data of well known data base management systems, which makes it very fast for exploring the data structures of enterprise size data bases.
Catalog awareness is accomplished by using configuration files for each flavor of DBMS to define the queries to run against the data base catalog meta data. There are also separate configuration files for the administration component. Data Base Management Systems of which AQT is aware of the catalog structure include IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, Sybase, and Informix.
There are two levels of licensing of AQT: the Standard License, which allows most functionality, and the Extended License, which allows full use including the administration tools, data compare, and the data loader.
AQT allows multiple database connections to be made. The connection can be made to any ODBC database defined. For each connection there is a database explorer window. The database explorer panel allows the user to display information about the database objects in that database.
The SQL editor allows multiple statements, which can be run in order through a multiple statements dialog. The results of the SQL go to a data window by default, but can also be directly exported to various file formats.
In addition to displaying the results of a query, the data window allows the updating of the data in the window. The query results can also be exported to various file formats including MS-Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, plain text, insert statements, and HTML tables.
The GUI Query Builder allows building SQL queries with point and click simplicity, which is handy for novice SQL programmers.
AQT Extended Edition includes a data loader tool that makes it easy to load data into tables from various sources. The sources can be other tables on the same database, a different database, a completely different kind of database (i.e. can load DB2 table from Oracle table), an Excel spreadsheet, a comma delimited (CSV) file, or a flat file.
AQT can compare the structure of two tables from the same or different database connections. The connections can be of different types. For example, the structure of a DB2 table can be compared to the structure of an Oracle table.
From the Data Base Explorer screen, AQT Extended Edition enables database administrators to grant and revoke privileges on database objects with point and click techniques.
AQT Extended Edition can do a comparison of all the data in a table to all the data in another tables. The tables can be on the same or different databases. It can also do subsets of data. For example, the comparison could be performed on the results of two queries.
AQT allows creation and execution of scripts that allow instructions, parameters to be passed as part of a script file which can be run in interactive mode or in unattended mode. For example, a script may be created to export results of a query to a file, with a current date and a filename that is prompted for from the user.
