QuickBase Straight Up

What Do You Do When Your Database Gets Too Big?

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:23:33 +0000

Many of us have recently received an e-mail from Intuit congratulating us on the success of our QuickBase application. In addition to extending good wishes, the email also indicates that the number of users, size of our QuickBase applications, or file attachment space may be exceeding the limits of our plan.

This article will focus on data limits, helping you come into compliance with your plan. To figure out what to do, you first need to understand the problem — here’s an easy, 3-step process.

Step 1: How much space do I get?

Start by checking your user and data plan. Go to your My QuickBase page and click on “Manage my Billing Account” (if you don’t see that, then you are not the Account Administrator — only that person can see these pages).

Next, click on “Change Plan” and you will see a page with a list of plans available to you. Among the different plans listed, one will be highlighted. That’s yours.

It shows the maximum number of users, application space, and attached file space allowed under your current plan. The number under “Applications (total size)” is the amount of space you get.

Step 2: How much space am I using?

Now you need to figure out how much space your applications are using. Go back to the Manage Billing Account page, and on the Summary Tab, under Current Usage you will see the total amount of application space your applications are currently using.

If you are using more space or users than you are paying for, you will need to get those two numbers in line with each other. You can purchase additional application space, or upgrade to a plan with more application space. You can find options here.

Alternatively, you can reduce the amount of data space your applications are using.

Step 3: Who is the Space Hog?

If you want to cut back on usage, you need to figure out who the space hog is. From the “Manage Billing Account” page click on the Applications tab. You will see a list of your applications and how much space each takes up.

Click on the application that is taking up the largest chunk of space and then click “Show Application Stats.” You’ll see a list of the tables. Under each table is the size of that table in bytes. Typically, you will find one or two tables that are using the lion’s share of your allotted space.

What Do I Do About it?

Now you need to figure out what to do about it. If you have a lot of old records, you may just choose to take them off-line. “Export this Report to a Spreadsheet.” can work, but that tool can also get confused by embedded quotes and other characters.

Another technique is to click on “Customize ===> Import / Export ===> Export a table to a file” which exports a whole table. We’ve also written custom scripts to move archievable data into less expensive platforms like MySQL. When you are satisfied you have saved the data off-line, you can delete the old records in QuickBase.

Other Options

If you can’t archive historical records, then you may need to consider a different course of action. The field most likely to be sucking up much your space is a notes field (a multi-line text field). You know, the field that includes a narrative of every time your client hiccoughed or called back to share their life story? Each letter is a byte, and they add up quickly. For example, this article is about 3500 bytes.

Deflating a Notes Field

If you see a Notes field that is taking a lot of space, one option is to “deflate” those notes into file attachments (your file attachment space limit is much higher than your application limit). The data is always available to “inflate” back into your records, so this is an easy way to save a lot of space. We have a utility for this, give us a call and we can give you details.

Empty Fields

The other likely culprit is tables with a large number of empty fields. In QuickBase, almost every empty field still occupies eight bytes. So if you have 300 fields in your table and 5000 records, your table occupies 12 MB, even if it is completely empty. Eliminating unused fields can save a significant amount of space.

The Big Picture

We’re just scratching the surface here. A close analysis should look at all of these factors–and more–in some detail. Take a step back and compare What we need the database for with What the database actually does. If there is a lot of functionality you don’t use, you can take that out and save space.

But taking these first steps will give you a good start. If you have any questions, call us; we can analyze your application and recommend ways you can save space.

Happy clicking,

Eric Segal

The Data Collaborative

QuickBase on your Mobile Phone

Intuit has moved ahead and set up a great QuickBase site for mobile devices. Don’t take our word for it - just open up your phone’s web browser, go to QuickBase, log in and start using your application.

You will be amazed at how easy and powerful it is.

Back Issues

Here are some links to high-demand articles from past issues — and all articles are available at www.QuickBaseStraightUp.com.

Reading the QuickBase Tea leaves
WYSIWYG Editting Tool
Free App Templates
QuickBase Best Practices

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line.

Send Our Tips to Your Friends!

Do you know other QuickBase users? Let them know about this newsletter (just click on the “Forward email” link below, and then they can click on the “Join Our Mailing List” link above). This is the only QuickBase newsletter, so there isn’t any other place to get this information!

Changes on the Fields Page

admin — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:41:55 +0000

Advanced user are accustomed to being able to click on Tablename–>Customize–>Fields and easily set whether a fields is searchable, reportable, etc.

The new page at that location does not include that ability –at least by default. But you can get it all back by clicking on the “Advanced Options” link on the upper right side of the page — see below.

Reading the QuickBase Tea Leaves

admin — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:41:02 +0000

When you choose software, you’re not just making a decision for today, you’re also deciding for tomorrow. This is especially true for Software as a Service (like QuickBase). When you compare and decide, you have to consider: will this product be around tomorrow? And will it still be the right product for my organization?

Some SaaS providers, like Blist, Doodle, Coghead and others disappeared fairly quickly, leaving their customers with little choice but abandoning the investment that staff had made in learning those systems. So if you are considering expanding your investment in QuickBase, how do you assure yourself and your purchasing department that QuickBase is the right choice today, and ten years from now?

We don’t *know* the future, but in the past two years there have been some pretty strong indications of where QuickBase is going.

Predicting the Future

The biggest changes of the past year have been infrastructure improvement and the mobile platform. With two new data centers, QuickBase can now make a legitimate claim to be a suitable platform for mission critical applications. Even in the event of natural catastrophe, your application will be back up within 30 minutes, and that is a far cry from the multi-day outages during the summer of 2010.

On the mobile end, QuickBase has very quickly become a mobile-friendly application. For now, QuickBase data is read-only on the mobile platform, but I’m sure that will change soon.

Looking at changes to the core QuickBase platform, I am most impressed not by the changes themselves (which have been helpful, if not euphoria-inducing), but the way the roadmap has been put together:

Users can now vote for the changes they would like the most,
the feature roadmap is exposed (in a limited way) to users, and
Release notes are much more comprehensive than they used to be.

What does this tell us? Both the new data centers and the mobile platform represent significant investments from Intuit. They could have made some minor data center improvements, left the mobile apps to the developer community, and saved major dollars. But they didn’t, and that tells me that they see QuickBase not just as an experiment, but as a long term, important product in the Intuit family.

The Roads Not Taken

Reading the QuickBase tea leaves, the roads not taken are just as important. There is still no entry-level pricing for QuickBase. You can start using Salesforce for $10 per month, or Caspio for $39, but QuickBase still starts at $299 for 10 users. That’s fine for the 50-employee consulting company or the 20-person workgroup in a large corporation, but it is out of reach for the Mom and Pop property management company, or the half dozen people in an import/export startup.

At the same time, the software itself is staying simple. Unlike other Platform-as-a-Service providers like Force.com and Amazon RDS, Intuit is not creating complex, difficult and powerful development tools. If you can use a spreadsheet, then you can probably develop a pretty useful QuickBase application.

So on the one hand, Intuit is not trying to sell QuickBase to the low end of the database market that Microsoft Access is gradually abandoning (anyone remember data pages? ADP files are next on the chopping block). On the other hand, they’re also not trying to compete as a high-end development platform with the enterprise products mentioned above.

So what does this mean to you, the QuickBase user? I think it’s mostly good news. QuickBase is around for the long run, and Intuit has demonstrated its commitment to keeping the product current. At the same time (and this is great news for you accidental techies), I think it is going to remain an easy to use product.

The sweet spot for QuickBase is not the IT department, taking 3 months to select a platform for its next big assignment. The sweet spot is the middle manager who needs to get an easy-to-use, dependable database operating quickly and inexpensively. For that user, QuickBase has always been a great pick, and I don’t see that changing.

Happy clicking,

Eric Segal

The Data Collaborative

New WYSIWYG Editing Tool

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:01:51 +0000

Bold, Italics, Pictures, and Colors…
in QuickBase Text Boxes

If you’re keeping track of your conversations with customers, you probably use a multi-line text box. You can put a lot of content in those boxes, but stylistically, your options do not go much past the options I had on a Smith Corona typewriter in 1978.

No bold, no italics, no colors, nothing but characters.

But with Data Collaborative’s new product, WYSIWYG for QuickBase Text Boxes, your main points will stand out. WYSIWYG stands for What You See is What You Get. It means that behind the scenes, we are using HTML to allow you all sorts of formatting options — but you see the text and pictures exactly as they will be output.

Let’s try an example. You’re selling a product, you meet a great prospect, and you write it up in a text box.

All the content is there, but if someone was scanning this quickly, they would miss the important pieces.

Here we have it with the WYSIWYG for QuickBase Text Box:

Huge difference, right? The bold and italics make certain words stand out. The photo, which I just dragged from a web page and dropped in the box, provides an instant reminder of who the contact is. The bullet points are much clearer than the text in the original box, and the clickable link means you can send the contact an email with one click.

Interested?

The cost is $99 for the first table, plus $20 per additional table for any same day installations. With pricing like that, you can’t lose. Call and order today!

Happy clicking,

Eric Segal

The Data Collaborative

P.S. - We have a nice video presentation of what you can do with WYSIWYG at http://www.datacollaborative.com/WYSIWYG/.

Mobile App Updated

Justin Klubnik is the developer of Pocket Base, a QuickBase app for Iphone/Ipad.

He recently let us know recently that there is a new release of his app. “The big change in this release is the ability to connect to apps in the Intuit Marketplace. There are also bug fixes and improved graphics for Retina Display devices included.” He was also kind enough to provide promo codes for QuickBase StraightUp readers:
6LA6R6LFAXLA
4WJ694LFKFKF
JXFATMLFRKKL

Making your Application Fun and Easy to Use

admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:55:19 +0000

Like chrome on a car, icing on a cake, or bling on your favorite outfit, there are certain details to a QuickBase application that can make or break the application. They may not have to do with the fundamentals of the application (tables, fields, relationships) but they are very important to the user.

So before you send your application off to users, here is a checklist for QuickBase bling.

1. The Blue Bar — This is a list of tables in your application. It’s handy for savvy users, but confusing for your more tech-phobic users. If your user base has no idea what it would mean to “List All”, you should hide the tables in the blue bar, and instead put function-oriented links on their dashboard (see here).

You can hide the tables either of two ways:

(a) to hide them for all users, click on the table name, then customize, then properties. Click on the Advanced tab, and then on “Hide from Menu Bar.”

(b) To hide a table for certain roles, click on Users in the Silver Bar, then Permissions (by role), then the role you want to address. Then click on the User Interface tab, and then the “Hide Table” checkbox, either for one table or all.

And while you are on that page…

2. The Silver Bar - Most of your users do NOT need to see some of the links on the silver bar. So follow the same instructions as in (b) above, and then in the “Menus” area, deselect the options you want to remove from the silver bar. Typically, you can remove “Customize” and “Users”, as those are options most users are not concerned with. If you want to have total control over the user experience, you can remove all the options. (see https://www.quickbase.com/db/bdx6xa6th for an application that is tightly locked down).

And while you are there….

3. Saving Shared Reports - While you are setting up roles, go to the “Permissions” tab and decide whether your users should be able to “Save Shared Reports”. The answer is probably no. We all create reports all the time, and if we all save them as “shared”, then pretty soon the list of available reports is huge, and no one know what any of them do. So let your users share Personal Reports - that should still keep them happy. For more info, see this.

4. Help Bubbles - It may be totally clear to you what “Capitalizable Task Budget Revision Number” means, but it might not be so clear to your users. So make judicious use of “Help Bubbles”. They are set in the field definition, and then available on forms.

5. Dashboard, Dashboard, Dashboard - You can’t spend too much time on the dashboard. This is the first page most users will see and it needs to clearly show them exactly how to do what they want to do. If they do not like the dashboard, you’ll hear from them (or worse, you won’t hear from them, and they just won’t use the application).
Think about the following:

What buttons and links should I put on this page, so that the user can easily get to whatever reports, forms, and pages they need to get ti?
What reports and charts should be on this page so that the user sees them immediately?
Do I want to keep the report list (on the left margin) and the “Introduction Section” on the dashboard? Usually, the answer is no.

What if some users need one dashboard and another set of users need another dashboard? Most likely, you then want to create separate roles for those sets of users, and give each what they want.

6. Default Fields - Dashboards with columns that head off to the east horizon or confusing or worse. To fix that, click on the table name in the blue bar, and then customize, and then fields. If you don’t see some check boxes on the left of your screen, click on “Show Advanced”, and then in the “Default Columns” field, select the fields that users will typically want to see in a list - usually not more than 10 fields. If the list gets too long, the important fields get pushed off to the side of the screen and your users will have to scroll to the right, which no one likes to do.

7. Face time - No, not the Apple application, real face time. No matter how great your application is, don’t just email your users a link and tell them to have a nice day. Find a time to work with them, live or over the web. Explain what the app is for, and show them how to use it. Check to make sure that fields and reports have names that make sense to the users. Make sure there is plenty of time for questions.

That’s it! Remember, it don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that bling.

Happy clicking

Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative