Review: DBxtra

DBxtra Pro 5.2.3, $249
Quanticus
Querétaro, Mexico
(201) 399-2218
http://www.dbxtra.com/

DBxtra offers a generalized querying and reporting tool for data scattered across many types of databases: Access, SQL Server, Paradox, MySQL, or pretty much anything else that you can get to via ODBC. It adds an additional layer of abstraction on top of these data sources, combining them into DBxtra "Projects": a project can contain tables and queries from multiple underlying databases, organizing these into named groups of objects and assigning friendly aliases to object and field names. The net effect is that someone who understands the overall structure of your enterprise data can set up a friendly view of data scattered across several databases for easier querying by end users who are perhaps less familiar with the underlying schemas.

Once you've set up your data, DBxtra provides a MDI interface for exploring it. The Data Explorer provides a treeview of all the objects in the project, and lets you easily filter and sort the data to see what's actually out there. There's also a query builder to join multiple objects together for results (no need to worry about which database they come from) and a report designer. The latter starts off with a tabbed interface that lets you pick things like which fields to include and which fields to group by from drop-down lists, and then gives you a complete graphical design surface for fine-tuning the report. There's a separate report viewer application, as well as the ability to schedule or e-mail reports.

DBxtra can also export data to HTML, XML, PDF, or Excel and publish data directly to a Web server via FTP. There's help built right into the user interface through a context-sensitive sidebar and various hyperlinks, though the color scheme (a light blue on white) for the table of contents was a bit hard on these aging eyes. There are a few other rough spots here as well: the query builder does not offer a graphical way to represent joins between tables, so whoever designs queries needs to understand building joins by picking matching fields from lists. And the MDI interface, with windows not constrained to a workspace but escaping to fly around the screen, may be confusing to some. In the underlying plumbing, you need to weigh the convenience of bringing all of your data into a single interface against the reliance on the older ODBC standard.

There's a 15-day trial version available for download (which continues to function in a reduced capability mode after 15 days). In addition to the Pro edition, there's a $79 Standard edition with fewer export options and without the scheduling and standalone report viewer applications.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.