Our hero Louis, who you would have read about in one of our previous articles, has a new hobby. As he is quite fond of going to the cinema, he has created his own website with information about movies. Louis stores movie titles and descriptions, cast lists, and other information in a database and updates it regularly. And with DBeaver, he can easily keep his site up-to-date.
Remember only important things
Louis is good at remembering titles, actors’ names and other information about movies, but he doesn’t keep in mind things like data format or maximum character limit for the tables. For example, he may forget the length of the movie description. Louis can view and edit all these settings in the Properties tab. But it is not very convenient for him to constantly switch between the Grid and this tab.
Louis can quickly view information about data format and size limits using the Metadata Panel. For example, he can simply select a cell in his table and open the panel to find out what the maximum description length is 16383 characters.
The Metadata Panel only works in read-only mode. If you want to make changes, go to the Properties tab.
Many tables are not a problem
Louis wants to provide users of his site with the most complete information about movies and easy navigation through them. Therefore, many tables in his database are linked by keys. It’s not very convenient to constantly switch between all these tables to add or edit data about one movie. But for Louis, this problem is solved by the References Panel, as it allows him to quickly view which tables the selected table is associated with. Unlike the Value Panel, it allows him to see all columns corresponding to the selected value.
Louis can not only jump between tables by keys but also edit data directly inside the panel since it works just like the Data Editor. For example, he can find out how many actors play in a particular movie, go to the actor by key and edit his name. And for this, he does not need to open the Actors table.
The References Panel has a Record mode which works the same as in the Data Editor. If an entry in the table matches only one value, this mode will be opened by default.
Sometimes there are errors in the texts on the site, and they need to be corrected quickly. If a movie title is misspelled and Louis knows the name of any actor in that movie, he can easily navigate to the right cell using the References Panel.
Louis and many of DBeaver’s users (e.g. content managers, marketing specialists, etc.) often need to make many small changes to data. If this issue applies to you as well, try to use the Metadata Panel and the References Panel in your work.
