I administrate a large number of Oracle databases for my company.

Some DBs are easily structured and the staff responsible for keeping them updated are able to use an Oracle client (SQirreL, PLSQL/Developer, or even MS Access as a client) to directly access Oracle and update their tables (without messing around with integrity etc).

Other DBs are too complex in their structure or the staff responsible for data updating are not able to handle with SQL and have no skills in working directly on DB objects…

For the later case I wish I could offer them a foolprof’ed, user-friendly web-based tool for updating data (enter new data; update existing data; delete data).

I dream of a generic DB-management application:
- configure your application by naming the tables, the relations between them, the constrains, etc, and you get on the fly an application that enables you to browse from master to slave table, to move from record to record and from column to column and edit/delete/insert data in/from/into them.
- perform checks (data type, domain constrains, etc) using the info from the data dictionary.
- perform pre-defined plausibility checks.
- supports data capture helps like drop-down-lists for foreign keys, check or radio buttons for flag-columns.
- etc etc etc.

This is something I would love to develop myself… if I only had the time!

I wonder that (at least as far as I have been able to google around) there is nothing like this on the market!

Best regards from Bonn, Julian

I clicked through to your blog about Access. Scanning the first six posts (none of which would be intelligible to the people Blist is clearly aiming at) I can safely say you are not in the target market.

I’ve had the misfortune to use Sharepoint at two companies now. It’s fine if you are 100% invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, but again, it’s complete overkill for a non-technical person seeking to create a simple database. Sharepoint also sucks if you are a Firefox/Mac/Linux shop.

I don’t know how many Microsoft only sites you have in Russia, but in many US companies (and most startups) if you decreed a Microsoft only policy you would have a riot on your hands.

Has anyone created an important report/document/spreadsheet using these toys for a serious assignment (and shown it to the boss)?

Many web-based Office competitors are “sexy” for tech journalism (yeah! here they come to crush Office and take over the world).

I have tried using some of these applications but had to switch to the good old MS Office to save my ass while trying to meet a deadline. Maybe I don’t know how to use such bleeding edge technologies!

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

We take the same approach in Zoho Creator: a GUI based form building capability with a script mode for power users.

In a nutshell the design philosophy is the time-tested one of “Make simple things easy, and difficult things possible”.

Putting sensitive data outside the firewall is de rigeur for most SME’s. Your bank is already outside the firewall! The majority of SME credit card processing is outsourced to third party vendors who store their data outside the firewall, not to mention the growth of outsourcing in critical applications like email (Google Apps) and CRM (Salesforce.com). It’s a non-issue for 90% of SME databases.

Hopefully, Blist will incorporate that as well as building on a more scalable architecture than DabbleDB uses (rumored to be an all in-memory database backend).

The reason the databases are behind a firewall isn’t because they are hard to use, but because they contain sensitive data. Reducing a barrier to entry on database access doesn’t make the data less sensitive and have the ability to be “in the cloud”.

Yea right. Do they think that companies are going to give out sensitive databases for a 3rd party to control? Please.

They are doomed for failure. It just seems like the company trying to do too much. There’s already an MS access and there seem to a lot of security implications not mentionned.

One pricing option would be to employ a two-part tariff: charge a license fee for each user-month and add an additional charge for the amount of space used. Hopefully this would fairly compensate blist for CPU time and storage costs.

CRM SaaS applications (salesforce.com) use a per-user-month pricing strategy which would not fit blist since a single user could be consuming much more resources in the blist database than a CRM app.