A Look at Valentina

Valentina is a set of tools including: Valentina DB (a new SQL database server), Valentina Studio (a database management tool), Valentina Report (a GUI to create reports to be used in an application like PHP) and a related development toolkit (called ADK).

In this article, we will take a look at:

• How to use Valentina Studio to manage our MySQL database;


• How to use Valentina Report to create a presentable report.

We will not, however, discuss the the Valentina Database as it is impossible to grasp a new database server and cover its underlying mechanisms in such a short article.

Valentina Studio

Valentina Studio, the database management tool, has two versions. One is free and can be downloaded here. Another is the Pro version, with more features, priced at $200 per unit. Both versions support Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, making it a cross-platform tool.

In this article, I will use Valentina Studio Pro. Thanks to Valentina for providing me with a key for my installation and evaluation.

The startup speed of Valentina Studio is fast, faster than another tool that I am using. Its main interface has 3 panes:

Fig. 1 The welcoming window

• Servers: Provides CS based database management. It supports four types of “servers”: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Valentina and ODBC. It supports both local server and remote server connections. In my case, we can see there are two remote MySQL connections and one local connection. A red dot before the connection (or “Bookmark” in Valentina’s term) means the server is currently down. A green dot means it is up and running.


• Database: Supports files based database management. Currently it supports Valentina DB and SQLite.


• Projects: This is mainly used in report generation. A “report” generated by Valentina can reside locally and remotely. But it must have Valentina Report Server support (bundled with Valentina Server) to be called from an application. The report project manages the source, query and design of a report. We will cover this later.

After selecting a server, the databases in that server will be displayed in the following cascading column view:

This is my favorite view in Valentina Studio. In this view, different levels of entities (database, table, fields, links, indexes, etc) are displayed in columns in a cascading style. Selecting a database in column one, we can choose to display tables, links, views in column two; and for tables, view its fields, indexes, etc in column three. And the final level of details will be displayed in the right most pane. We can also create and modify an entity accordingly.

Another view, less used in my case, is the tree view:

When a table is selected, it displays the table data in a grid view; when a field is selected, only the column data is displayed. In the grid, we can right click on a record to export that record into CSV or SQL.

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