Second Half

From a handful of great guys in Vancouver comes Dabble DB, which, as the company puts it: "...combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applicaitons into a new way to manage and share your information on the web."

Thanks to Tim Bray, via his Ongoing blog for the post that mentioned it.

Anyway, I started a 30-day free trial of Dabble DB back on June 27th. Since that time, I have been impressed with both the product and the company. The product basically, as they say, gets you out of all those database applications that we wind up shoe-horning into spreadsheets because they are just two-dimensional tables and Excel makes it easy to make those. The problem is that once you really want to do anything remotely interesting with your data (and I'm talking mostly non-numeric data for me), you're not quite sure how to go about it and it's definitely not straightforward. Dabble lets you import a spreadsheet with ease and then you can ease your way into managing and slicing and dicing and organizing and filtering and grouping so you can get the data represented and presented in a way that makes the most sense for your use.

The most interesting attraction to me (as if the above were not enough) was that once you've got your categories (read as tables) and fields defined, Dabble DB lets you "export" the code for a web-based form that you can drop into any web page. Once you do this, and someone fills out the form, the data goes right into your database. This was a survey waiting to happen.

So, with Dabble DB in hand, and me being in a new job involving trying to find out what was on the mind of nearly 400 college students, I set up the database with questions for field names and posted a survey to the web. Not only was this insanely simple to do, but within 24 hours of sending out the email request to students, asking them to complete the survey, I had a Dabble DB database with 100 responses (ok, it helped that I offered a chance to win an iPod Nano). The survey started on July 18th and by the deadline (August 15th), I had 201 unique responses. And all of the data was in a form that allowed me to analyze it in a myriad of ways with very little effort. I found myself waking up in the morning with a new way to look at the data and literally minutes after I sat down, I had the view of the data as I wanted.

Interestingly, since the product is relatively new, along the way of my 30-day trial, the guys at Dabble DB, happened to be adding features to the product that made it even easier to do certain types of tabulation. I know they weren't just for me, but their responsiveness to requests was nearly frightening (I do hope they sleep).

They have a wonderful User Forum set up and they are incredibly active in reading every single posting and responding in thoughtful ways and, if needed, requesting direct email to resolve an issue. I cannot say enough positive things about how this has gone so far. The forum itself is now open to the public, so you can even get a sense of the action and positive vibe before you sign up.

The database is multi-user, and you can allow read-only access or read-write or read-write with build privileges.

I think that these guys have reached just the right balance of functionality and service and the pricing is reasonable. I'm using the "Basic" level, which lets me build up to 10 applications with 5 unique users and it includes SSL.

If you're looking for a sharable web-based database app, I'd strongly encourage you to at least take the 30-day free (no credit card needed) trial.

No disclaimer needed as I have zero financial interest in the company; other than it's saving me a ton of time and, as we know, time is money.

P.S. The company also has a blog.

P.P.S I only mentioned a handful of the many features of the product. There's lots more that I haven't even taken advantage of (yet).