The latest release of Caspio Bridge Online went live this week. Its major enhancement is the ability to create charts. Other enhancements include auto-thumbnail maker.
According the company the charting capabilities of Caspio is compatible with iPhone and iPad. This comes after a recent release of iPhone kit that makes it possible for Caspio customers to create iPhone, iPad and Android compatible web apps.
Quickbase Customers Complain on Twitter
Quickbase database service and many other Intuit online services including Quickbooks and merchant services went down for over 24 hours. The message posted on Quickbase status page at 5:30 PM ET on June 16th didn’t provide details into the causes but indicated they “…are making progress toward restoring a number of websites affected by a service disruption.”
Complaints poured in on Twitter as customers vented their frustrations.
Currently the service is restored but Quickbase blog and other communication channels remain mum about what happened and how it will be prevented in the future.
Android, iPhone, iPad and other mobile platforms for apps are becoming mainstream and businesses find it necessary to make their apps compatible with them. Caspio has announced the availability of a kit that simplifies the creation of web apps for these devices.
The kit provides a framework that is an iPhone website-in-a-box. It also includes a Caspio style that can be applied to apps. Once put together, Caspio apps can look almost like native iPhone apps. These apps look just as native on iPad and Android devices.
Quickbase also announced that their apps are now compatible with iPad.
More information: Caspio Kit for iPhone
Twitter today announced the acquisition of Smallthought Systems, the owners of DabbleDB. Their interest in DabbleDB is rooted in Trendly, an analytics program. DabbleDB customers seem to be in limbo for the time being. This is not very reassuring for business users.
On the company’s website customers are told that no more future enhancements to DabbleDB are planned, no new customers are accepted and “there will be further changes to Dabble’s ongoing operations”. Customers are told that DabbleDB will provide 60 days notice if a major change happens.
The major change has happened and DabbleDB doesn’t seem to fit the objectives of Twitter. The best outcome would be for some company to buy DabbleDB from Twitter, but the other likely possibility is that DabbleDB is completely discontinued, similar to what happened to Coghead when SAP acquired it a few years ago.
DabbleDB customers are advised to start looking for an alternative solution. Those looking for a free account can check out our review of free online databases. Business customers may want to consider Caspio’s transition program for DabbleDB customers that was announced today.
Quickbase is an online database by Intuit that has been around for many years. Our intention was to build an online application with Quickbase and place a submission form for data entry purposes on our site. The application was going to have multiple users for administration of data. As you see later we could not complete our test due to various complexities, some of which would have been addressed given enough time to explore and find an answer. We spent about an hour only but had expected to be able to build something decent in this amount of time. After all, we consider ourselves quite tech-savvy, if not pure geeks.
Our sample data included Unicode characters
Quickbase import data process - click to enlarge
Quickbase did not handle Unicode characters - click to enlarge
We began by importing data. Quickbase defaults to pasting data into a text box. This of course is not suitable for large databases so we tried the file import method. Quickbase only supports Comma and Tab separated values files. There is a big drawback to this as text files cannot handle Unicode characters. We ran into major issues trying to import data which included international characters. None of the methods provided by Quickbase alleviated this issue and their documentation and help files did not offer any solution. In fact it appears that many Quickbase users face the same issue.
Our next attempt was to create a table from scratch. Quickbase does a good job here. Many many specific data types are available to choose from. Quickbase combines the idea of form element formatting, data presentation and data types and puts them all in table design. The advantage to this is that once you define a field say as text-area, it is always a text-area in all your interfaces. However it can be problematic if you change your mind later or under certain conditions want to display the data or form control differently.
We found it easy to create relational databases in Quickbase, a feature missing in some other online databases.
The user interface for authoring forms and reports is very complicated and non-standard as compared to other mainstream databases. To get full understanding of Quickbase you must be willing to go to the Quickbase school and be in learning mode for a while. This was a deal breaker for us and prevented us from creating a complete application given the time constraint.
We could not possibly find a way to accomplish simple tasks. For example, the user interface and the various help systems did not offer a way to change the name of a form that we had misspelled. In general the help system rarely returned a relevant answer to our various search terms.
Could not find a way to rename a form name in Quickbase's interface - click to enlarge
Putting a submission form on our site turned out to require many confusing steps of assigning a token to the application in the advanced setting of the application under customization and then to use an unfriendly wizard outside Quickbase. Quickbase provides these instruction to do the task. The result of the wizard was an HTML code segment that rendered an unimpressive form. The form is not created dynamically on demand, which means if the table or fields change, the entire generation of HTML and placing it on the website has to be repeated. And unfortunately the outcome looked pretty, um, basic looking. We expected a bit more finesse.
You can see for yourself various Quickbase-powered forms out there by searching “Powered by Quickbase” on Google.
Another issue with Quickbase is that all your application users must be invited by you from within your Quickbase account and get registered with Quickbase. This is the root of Quickbase pricing model. The starting package is $299 per month and includes 10 users and and space for 25,000 records.
Quickbase is a solid choice if you don’t have much data or users and don’t have to built new apps. They offer a library of many pre-built applications that you can load into your account. If you find what you want, and if you don’t need public access to them then you might find Quickbase the right choice. However, if must build a custom app and require public deployment of forms and reports and apps, or if you have more than say 25,000 records, Quickbase is not appropriate for you. Also, remember to put aside sufficient time to learn Quickbase. It’s not for the faint of heart.
You can find many free online word processors and spreadsheets, but when it comes to online database the universe is much smaller and the choices for “free” online databases are even more limited. The main reason is that databases are typically more complex applications and more goes into maintaining them. Furthermore, they are marketed to business who supposedly can afford to pay for it.
There are still good free online databases out there. We have assembled a few here.
A free Caspio Personal account has more of what most users care about. You can build 2 apps which could be any combination of forms or reports, for unlimited users and store well over 100,000 records in your tables. Caspio limits the number of auto emails to 100 per months. If you reach your limit, your apps stop working for the remainder of the month or you could become a paying customer.
We found Caspio’s free online database to be the most generous offering available.
DabbleDB gives you space for 100,000 records and access to 15 users, which is plenty for most users, but your data becomes public.
Zoho’s free package is quite limited. It’s only good for 2 users, 3 apps and 2 reports. Records are limited to only 1,000 and there appears to be no emails in the free package.
Google Spreadsheet is not a true database, however, if you simply need an online place to store some data, it may be adequate.
Earlier this month Google App Marketplace was launched with much fanfare. We’ve been following the growing list of apps on this directory to see if any of the leading online databases appear. So far none are present.
For the time being if you are looking for an online database you’re better off visiting vendor websites directly. Microsoft is also about to launch a similar directory. We’ll keep an eye on that one too.
Caspio shows how the complex concept of one-to-many online databases are handled by it platform.
Andrew Mager of ZDNet has posted an informative blog on best practices in web form design. Online database professionals can find his post useful. Unfortunately, online databases currently don’t give you most of the design capabilities that are needed to implement what is discussed here. As a result these remain primarily an option for developers.
You can read it at http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife/?p=1271.
InfoDome announced its entry into the online database market with the beta release of its solution. The December 2 announcement says that InfoDome enables import from a variety of file formats and a drag-and-drop form creator.
The formal launch of the service is scheduled for Q1 2010.
The online database market is dominated by long time players such as Caspio, Quickbase and Zoho Creator. It would be interesting to see how a new player such as InfoDome can gain market share as others including Microsoft plan to enter the space.
