2008 New Year Message from TheDevShop

2007 has come and gone, a good year all and all. We did a few interesting outsource projects and we managed to release major upgrades to all of the dbQwik Family products. dbQwikSite took second price in the national software industry awards. TheDevShop was named “Finalist” in Red Herring’s Asia’s Top 100 most promising privately help IT companies. We couldn’t have done it without our dedicated staff and our customers. As I bid farewell to 2007, I do so offering a “super-duper-mega-humongous” THANK YOU to employees of TheDevShop Ltd. and to our Customers who not only support us financially, but serve as a source of inspiration as well.

Now TheDevShop enters 2008, a bright new year with a bright new plans and dreams. What coming in 2008? Some may have noticed that TheDevShop planned releases of dbQwikSite for Q4 2007 did not materialize, and things got very quite in the marketing and communications. What happened is that we were given an opportunity to work on a large scale social networking, web 2.0, dot Net project. I saw a huge synergy in the project and the dbQwikSite product road map. So we put R&D on hold in exchange for some heavy duty hands on experience into the technologies that we want to incorporate into dbQwikSite and dbQwikEdit. While this resulted in the delay of dbQwikSite releases, it also means that we are well positioned now to incorporate all the knowledge gained in our latest project into the tool. The new result should be a new dbQwikSite in 2008 which will be a major leap forward into the world of web 2.0. dbQwikSite will be doing all the cool stuff in AJAX and .net producing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the blink of an eye.

dbQwikEdit is also on the road map for some major changes in 2008, with stronger support for XML being our primary target. Look for a hybrid database / XML tool, marrying the two technologies. Expect to see XPath and XQuery support in 2008.

dbQwikReport is due for a reunion in 2008. dbQwikReport began as a spinoff of dbQwikSite to provide users with a simple way to create reports on web hosted databases using standard scripting technology. dbQwikReport has received a lot of interest from the community. There seems to be a real demand for a simple, light weight reporting solution for hosted databases. In 2008 we hope to migrate the reporting features of dbQwikReport back into the dbQwikSite framework. This should result in some major improvements in terms of user interface and flexibility.

2008 holds a lot of promise for our users, who will see the advent of the next generation of the dbQwik family of tools on your desktops. For us at TDS it is a very exciting and ambitious plan. We are committed to develop the best tools possible to support technology trends. And always in the spirit of “dbQwik” we will be packing high-tech knowhow into simple to use, affordable software.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog to be informed of the latest developments from TheDevShop.

dbQwikEdit SQL Tool Prices Slashed

dbQwikEdit, TheDevShop's multi-database data manager has just gotten cheaper with Pro version selling for only $39.95 USD. That's an incredible price, the competition can't even come close, neither in price or functionality. I did a quick survey on the Internet, most competing products are priced between $69 to $250 USD. That makes dbQwikEdit the best value in town.

For those who are not familiar with dbQwikEdit, it is an SQL tool and visual query builder. It works with most databases so you don't need to buy and learn a different took for every database you use. Like all the dbQwik family of tools, dbQwikEdit does not require that you have advanced programming and technical knowledge to use the tool productively. But if you happen to be a database SQL guru, the tool has no problems supporting the demands of power users.

You can find more information and a free trial edition on the web http://www.dbqwikedit.com/

dbQwikEdit 3.4.0.0 Adds Office 2007

Today we release dbQwikEdit 3.4.0.0. In this release, we add a few new features that some users have been looking for as well as the regular set of bug fixes to known issues.
The two highlights of this release is a reworked connection wizard and Office 2007 support.
Building ADO connection strings easier than ever using the new connection wizard. That said, sometimes easy just doesn’t go far enough. Our power users have been demanding more control over their connection strings. The new connection wizard opens the door to entering connection strings manually.

The other major update is the addition of Office 2007 support. What does “office 2007 support” mean? It means that dbQwikEdit can now work comfortably with MS Office new “x” file formats. When using MS Access you work with accdb office 2007 formats in addition to the classic mbd files. MS Excel xsl and xslx file types are both supported in this release of dbQwikEdit.

If you are not a MS Office user yet, there are still a slew of bug fixes that make upgrading worthwhile. We clean up some exceptions and fixed some irritating bugs. Some of these bugs include: inability to modify primary keys in some cases, adding fields sometimes missed the “not null” option, specifying lengths of MS Access text fields at times was missing and a few minor tweaks to the data grid.

Existing version 3 users can get the latest release by running live update from the help menu, new users or users of older version can get more information about available upgrades at www.dbQwikEdit.com

dbQwikEdit 3.3.0.2 Expands Database Support and Fixes

We just released dbQwikEdit 3.3.0.2. In this release many of the functions of the program have been enhanced to cover a wider variety of databases, particularly desktop databases such as Dbase and Paradox but some additional Oracle work is also in this release. We also fixed a bug that caused the program to seemingly hang if you allow it to auto adjust your myODBC settings. Now the auto-optimize of myODBC settings works better. Optimizing your ODBC settings will address the dropping of MySQL connections resulting in “MySQL server has gone away” errors.

We have tweaked the query syntax builder to better size the list boxes on start up and done a lot of work on the batch move. You can now create target table definitions from queries as well as tables. Parameterized queries now process better.

All an all this is a pretty limited release as far as new features, but it adds a ton of stability and is worth the live update.

dbQwikReport 1.3 Vista Ready

Today we release dbQwikReport version 1.3. It is a both an important release, and a boring release. It is important in that, it is now compatible with windows Vista, and boring in that there no great new features for me to write about.

Anyone already using Windows Vista, or planning a move to Vista, can rest assured that their investment in dbQwik products is a sound one. dbQwikSite, dbQwikReport and dbQwikEdit all will run on your Vista machine. Only one left to migrate: dbQwikSync Pro and you should expect that one shortly.

There is one significant enhancement in dbQwikReport 1.3. It is a bug fix, of sorts. Actually the bug is with Microsoft ADO, it simply will not handle MySQL Timestamp data types. So, our fix is that we catch the error, and we allow you to continue designing, but without any data in your preview. When you deploy to PHP/MySQL all your data will appear. There are a couple important things to note here. It is far better to use DateTime data types in MySQL if you want your tables to be accessible by any tools that are based on MS ADO, technology (like the dbQwik Products and ASP). The resulting data storage is the same. Users of dbQwikSite should note that we have not fixed this issue yet in dbQwikSite… so best to avoid Timestamps in MySQL all together.

dbQwikReport 1.3 is a free upgrade available via live update. You access live update from the help menu of the program.

While we are on the topic of technical “stuff” and version numbers there is an important tidbit I have to share with you. I was using dbQwikEdit on my laptop lately. I could not believe how unstable it was; no matter what I did it seemed to go wrong. After firmly scolding all the developers with harsh words about quality and the likes, I was asked the question:
“What database?”
“MySQL, and we are supposed to support it! Nothing new here folks!” I retorted.
“What version of myODBC are you using?”
“I just updated maybe a couple weeks ago, 3.51.14.0” was my reply as my confidence began to fade.
“Can you try 3.51.15.0?”

I returned to my desk, and about 2 minutes, later I was both humbled and happy. It was like dbQwikEdit had magically transformed from a “clunker” to a “cool tool”. I learned two things: 1) go easy on the staff and 2) make sure that my ODBC drivers are stable. I share this with you in case anyone out there is using myODBC 3.51.14.0. and thinking: hey, the TheDevShop software doesn’t work at all. Please, please upgrade your myODBC to 3.51.15! It will make a major difference and bring serenity to your query building.

dbQwikEdit 3.2 – Vista Ready

This week we release dbQwikEdit version 3.2. In this release we have added support for Windows Vista, enhanced the table editor and implemented a number of bug fixes.

We are working on ensuring all our products are Windows Vista compatible, this week, it is dbQwikEdit’s turn. Version 3.2 is now ready to go to work on your Windows Visa machine. We also retrofitted all the improvements of the database table editor from dbQwikSite back into dbQwikEdit. You can now edit database structures more easily with compatibility across a wider range of databases.

We have enhanced importing data from XML and CSV into tables making this function more robust under a wider variety of circumstances.

Registered users of version 3 can get the latest updates using live update found in your help menu of the program. Users of dbQwikEdit 2 can get more information on available upgrades from www.dbQwikEdit.com/upgrade.html