SuperOrca: The almost perfect Orca replacement

Yesterday, I stumbled onto Betanews and discovered a freeware application hiding in the enormous list of shareware junk. What caught my eye was the phrase “Orca-replacement”. Readers, this is Pantaray Research Ltd.’s SuperOrca. Honey, these are my readers. Where are they? Oh, they’re imaginary. Play along.

One of the most irritating tasks to perform with Microsoft’s Orca tool, as everyone knows, is the extraction of a file from the Binary table. With Orca, you’re forced to double-click [Binary Data], which brings up a painfully un-intuitive Edit Binary Stream dialog. From this dialog, you then select Write binary to filename, click Browse, specify a location to save to, and finally click the myriad of Ok buttons. With SuperOrca, however, you simply right-click {Binary Data}, click Write binary to file, and specify a location to save to. Thank. God.

Microsoft Orca makes saving binary files a click-happy nightmare.

SuperOrca saves the day (and your fingers) with a simpler method of saving binary files.

Other nice features you won’t find in Microsoft’s Orca tool include cross-table keyword searching, MSI comparison, dialog previewing, and other advanced schema editing/validation tools. Now, I did mention it was almost perfect... Unfortunately, SuperOrca does not have any Transform generation tools, that I could find. When I’m not ripping files out for reverse engineering, I’m usually gluing them back in, generating Transforms as a kind of poor man’s patch.

Because of the gap in coverage, I’m forced to keep the Orca tool around. I emailed the gang to see if they could slip that functionality into their next version, if they’re still working on it. I promised them bacon chocolate-chip cookies in return.