Hacking SetupX - working on the sql tables instead of hibernate

Currently one of my jobs is to get data out of the setupX system, since the developer left us and nobody has a clue how it actually works.

So far the basic understanding is that the system has one major table and all queries are executed by building sub queries in it.

Advantage of the technique:

it's extremely flexible,
Disadvantage?

It's ridiculous slow and a nightmare to figure out, since you got so many possible sub graphs.

Don't we love reverse engineering an existing software?

So this is just a small collection of statements to get data out.

get list of available questions and attributes


select question from formobject group by question;


get the list of registered species


select value from formobject where question = 'species' group by value;



The final idea is to make a snapshot of the database every night and transform it into a real database structure. Like having several tables and so.