Late last week I was pinged by Peter Cooper asking if I’d seen DabbleDB and how it compares with thingamy. I hadn’t but a few emails later and I got a 30 day trial. So over the weekend I’ve been playing with what is a shareable mashup of a database and spreadsheet to create the start of a Client Relationship Management system. Click on the screenshot to see how far I got…in 10 minutes.
It is aimed at Excel users who can’t quite get into Access or Filemaker and baulk at Intuit’s Quickbase. Andrew Catton, one of DabbleDB’s developers says in comments to the Techcrunch review:
The online spreadsheet products, like all spreadsheets, can be great for financial work heavy in calculations, but spreadsheets simply fall down pretty quickly when used for database purposes, in terms of modelling and in that they aren’t great for looking at your data in many different ways.
That’s true though I find spreadsheet bigots expend hours of time shoehorning spreads into doing what comes naturally in the database world. But I digress. As a modelling tool I like it a lot. Intuitive is the word that springs to my mind.
It uses the idea of ‘categories’ where in database terms we’d probably say ‘tables.’ The model is fully relational so anyone who has played with Access will understand this. To get around the complexities of managing one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, DabbleDB uses the concept of linking to other data and then manipulating according to how you need to view the data. At that level it works very well. And instead of building queries to obtain a view, you simply include or exclude different fields of data.
Comments at Techcrunch asked how it compares with wikiCalc and Zoho Creator. I’ve not looked at ZC in any detail but it’s nothing like wikiCalc except in the sense it is a sharable online application. wikiCalc starts from the spreadsheet principle. The same seems to be true of ZC but I need to check this out to be sure. Similarly, DabbleDB doesn’t include process flow which is where thingamy’s main strength lays.
Interestingly, the developers are seeing this as something that might be tied to Writely, the online word processor I’ve standardised upon and which is now owned by Google. It suggests this is being developed for a flip to Google. If so then OK – I’m easy with that. But, it will need a lot more work. At present, calculation capability is limited but you can fudge it by importing existing spreadsheet data.
Who’s it aimed at? This is small workgroup stuff so it isn’t going to appeal to the 100 person practice. Having said that, it will work well for the sub-50 group where there are only a handful of concurrent users. That makes it ideal for the thousands of small practices out there looking for something easy to use and which has ‘good enough’ functionality.
Pricing has not been set but they are talking $25-$50 per month, depending on the number of applications and number of users. That’s not totally unreasonable but I need to see the final numbers to figure out how this adds up in value delivery terms.
If anyone is interested in playing with the crude app I knocked up then let me know in comments and I’ll see what I can do to let you in. But if you do choose to play with it, then remember it is beta software – there are a few bugs but they won’t prevent you from having fun whipping up a quick application or two. Hint: time and expense is a logical one to have a crack at, as is project management (aka – audit/consultancy control)
UPDATE: I’ve mentioned the lack of calculation functionality. Avi Bryant (one of the lead developers) confirms it is a tad limited. But…I believe this is outweighed by usefulness in a number of scenarios. Check out this post covering information views. The example of Billable Hours should help contextualise it.
Technorati Tags: application development, client relationships, dabbledb, innovation, wikicalc
