f13.net

so for like the last 8 years, I've been using SQL Advantage to run queries and whatnot.  I know little about databases and blah blah blah.  I just login and do my thing.  At most, I run a simple Update statement.

Well, SQL Advantage doesn't work on Sybase 15.  Is there a good open source client that someone could recommend?

I've used Aquavis Datastudio at work it supports Sybase 15 and a boatload of other servers.  It is sort of counter intuitive sometimes but it does the job.

OK.  Is it open source?  I did a google and nothing came up.

It is a commercial product and sorry it is aqua fold not aqua vis: http://www.aquafold.com/aquadatastudio_downloads.html

edit: $400 is an ungodly amount of money to pay to run the occasional update query.   If you have a programming language hanging around that has sybase connectors I would just do that.  php can do this if you have a web server or even just grab the lamp stack VM from turnkey linux and use that with virtual box.  Connecting to a database and executing a query is like 6 lines of code you dont need to be a master programmer to handle that.

edit2:  After a quick google coming up with this page of alternative tools: http://www.sybaseteam.com/sybase-query-tools-t-89.html, I would try SQuirreL SQL Client or Orac.

TOAD is one of the more popular cross-vendor tools, and I think there's a SysBase version.

When I'm not using SQL Server Management Studio, I usually use SQL Explorer for Eclipse.  It looks like there's a stand-alone version available: http://www.sqlexplorer.org/.  It should work with anything that has a JDBC driver.

I've no idea what a JBDC driver is.  I assume that's important?

Java Database Connection driver.  It's just a .jar (zip) file that tells a Java program how to connect to a database.  

• Download a JDBC driver for your database: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtds/files/jtds/1.2.5/jtds-1.2.5-dist.zip/download
• Extract the .jar file somewhere
• Launch program, add/edit JDBC driver
• Point it to the extracted .jar file
• Set your connection URL to something like: jdbc:jtds:sybase://localhost:5000/<database>;user=sa;password=123

Or, you can create a normal ODBC connection in windows, and use the JDBC-ODBC bridge.  It won't be as performant, but it'll work.

This is amazingly more difficult than it should be.

So I'm giving SQuirrel a shot, and it doesn't like my URL.  

Edit2: perhaps its because I don't have an Exampled URL or Class Name for this driver.  

Edit3: I needed to drop the driver in the Libs directory.  Looks like it's working.