Dabbling with DabbleDB

When I wrote my blog about Google Spreadsheets, one of the comments referred me to DabbleDB. Well, I took a look, and it is very nice! I love its intuitive interface and how easy it is to get up and running, both with a new database and with importing. I highly recommend viewing the video of the demo.

They way they handle schema evolution is wonderful, and there are a lot of opportunities for some very interesting collaboration. Very cool that you can export to RSS and it looks like in the future to Atom. It is also pretty amazing this is all happening in a web browser; I often forgot that was what I was in and was treating it like a regular app. A sign of a very well written AJAX application.

I tried and tried to find out if they had support for storing the data offline, but couldn't find anything. Does anyone have any info on this?

I did look at the privacy policy, and I have to admit after all the news of data getting stolen and compromised, it didn't give me a warm fuzzy. No discussion of security auditing; no discussion of how they are securing your data; no clear ability to ensure that your data has been removed completely when you want it removed. Hmm...

I had thought of maybe using it to quickly create some apps for my personal data, but found myself backing off from putting my data on their server. It appears that their focus is on SMBs, but would SMBs want to put their business data online like this? I also found myself not wanting to pay the monthly fee; I do hope they can find another business model that doesn't require the consumer to pay. Maybe they could make it free up to 10MB of data or something. Otherwise I'm concerned that they just won't get the uptick I think they deserve.

I was also very curious what their back-end architecture looked like, but when I went to their corporate web site I could only find a blog. Some very nicely written JavaScript (I love this Firefox plugin to view all the JavaScript included files), but I couldn't find my way through to see how and where they are storing the data.

So, this is a very nice interface, and I'd love to use it while storing my data locally. I may still use it for some collaborative data, but it would have to be worth the price...