A few weeks ago I got a beta invite to Dabble DB. I tried it out and I was simply blown away. I haven’t been so impressed with the comprehensive usefulness and ease of use of an online application in a long time.

Its so easy that my nine year old son, Avynn, was able to create a database to track his test scores for the Accelerated Reader (AR) program at school with minimal assistance from me after we had a 15 minute conversation about what a database is. He created a table (termed a Category in Dabble) of books and one of his AR test scores, set up the relationship between the tables and created a view that grouped and totaled the results by quarter (displayed below). It took us about 45 minutes to build including the painfully slow data entry skills of a third grade typist!

I had already played with Dabble DB for a while before the experiment with my son and managed to create a database application to maintain a customer database for a friend of mine with 6 tables each with relationships, some with more than 1 per table, and 11 views with grouping and aggregation in under 4 hours. It’s something that my friend would easily be able to make immediate use of and easily add any missing data fields and relationships. The orientation, learning curve and jotting notes for feedback took up the majority of the time I spent on it. I could easily recreate the entire application in about 1.5 hours if I needed to do it again. I was amazed at how easy it was.

Here’s part of the email I sent back to the developers (Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton) after that project:

First I want to say thanks for the invite! And second I want to say OH MY GOSH this is an awesome application! I am so very impressed. And I’ve beta tested a lot of things. This is the most useful, functional and well thought out beta I have seen maybe ever, especially among the class of app it is. Relational databases are not easy things to create and maintain, but you guys have done a really excellent job making it simple, quick and even fun (in an extremely nerdy way)!

I’ve been playing with it for a few hours today, setting up a project that I’ve had in mind to do for a friend of mine and I’m amazed at what I have after my relatively small amount of effort. During the whole experience, I kept saying, “well, X is cool, but I wish it could just do Y… that would make it even better.”, and to my amazement, after poking around a few minutes more, I’d find that I can do Y!! I started out with a big list of enhancements and by the time I was done whittling out the stuff that was there anyway, I’ve only got 5! You guys rock!

Dabble DB came out of beta last week and I think that it is a great alternative to anyone who’s now using more than one Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Access database to keep track of their information. Dabble DB is friendly enough that anyone who can handle creating a spreadsheet and certainly someone who’s using an Access database can easily set up their own Dabble applications. Heck, if my son can do it, then just about anyone can! No longer will small business owners need to rely on their brother-in-law’s programmer friend to set up a small database for them. As one of those potential programmer friends, that’s probably not good news for me wanting to pick up some side work, but oh well, more time for my own pet projects. Of course Avynn’s leet database services are for hire if you need them after all!