Dabble DB Blog

Dabble in the News

Natasha John — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:53:08 -0800

Our ears have been ringing and we now know why - you’ve been talking about us.

We're curious to know how you’re using Dabble. Thanks to blogs and videos, every so often we get a glimpse.

Whether barrel prices are falling, or pirates are hijacking ships, oil is always a topic of conversation in the news and at home. Recently, Jon Udell was chatting to a friend about oil and wanted to know where most of our oil comes from. Well, he did his research and used Dabble to create a nice map to show the results, complete with geographic percentage breakdowns.

Moving across the pond...

Simon Willison used Dabble to help him organize The Guardian's first ever Hack Day, which consisted of 37 demos, 24 hours, 15 guest hackers, 8 judges and a handful coveted trophies. More coverage here.

Dabble has also been getting quite a few tweets lately on Twitter.

Your long range weather forecast calls for sun, wind, rain or snow.

Plays well with others

Ben Matasar — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:37:18 -0700

Dabble has always given you great ways to get your data out via our computer readable exports, but it hasn't been as easy as we'd like for you to edit the data and get it back into your database. To improve this, we've introduced some features that you can use to introduce Dabble to some of the other applications out there.

Entry ID numbers

Some of our more intrepid customers have noticed that Dabble assigns an internal ID number to everything in their database, but they couldn't use these numbers in imports as a key to match their existing data. Well, I'm pleased to announce that now you can now match against these internal Dabble-generated IDs while importing. We at Dabble have been using this feature already as we're developing it, and we think it makes editing your data in a spreadsheet and getting it back into Dabble much easier.

But maybe you don't like our existing entry ID numbers, which aren't necessarily sequential or specific to a category. Old database pros might want an autoincrement field, and so we've added this feature to Dabble. When configuring a text field, there's a new option, called 'autoincrement' that works with your default value. If I type in 'THX-1138,' Dabble will assign 'THX-1138' to the default field of the next planet object I create, and increment the default to 'THX-1139.' This should help our users who depend on sequential values for a particular category, not just for imports but also bookkeeping.

Excel-friendly export

Our CSV export has served us well, but we've always wanted to be able to do an export targeted more directly at the millions of Microsoft Excel users out there. We finally found something that works nicely, and so you can now download data directly to Excel from Dabble. We're pleased with it.

-Ben

Giving Dabble DB a time machine

Avi — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:59:03 -0700

We received this email earlier today:

It's not the first. Every week, we field requests like this, and we're always delighted to help, because we know all too well the sickening feeling of accidentally deleting or overwriting data, and the relief of being able to restore from a complete and recent backup. But today, I was even more delighted to be able to give a different response:

Dear [Customer],

Please check the Backup & History tab of the Admin page, and you should find a tool that looks like this:

Just choose one of the listed restore points, wait a minute or so, and you can log back in with everything exactly the way it used to be. And I do mean everything: user permissions, color scheme, attachments, and of course your data, in every application, will be rolled back (about the only thing that won't change is your plan and payment info).

Hope this helps,
Avi

Dabble DB on Twitter

Avi — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:17:44 -0700

In an effort to keep everyone more informed about what's going on with Dabble DB, we've started a Twitter profile. If you'd like to get updates on service, new features, or if you just want to fire a quick question our way, you can now follow us there.

Emergency server maintenance

Avi — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:30:04 -0700

One of our servers has been taken down for emergency maintenance. Please visit the forum for more information.

Update: The server is back online. We apologize for the disruption.