Review: DBxtra 2005

DBxtra 2005, $299
Quanticus
Querétaro, Mexico
(201) 399-2218
http://www.dbxtra.com/

DBxtra 2005 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 or OLEDB. This new major release adds a lot of new features and polish to an already-solid utility, making it much more pleasant to use and making things work (for me at least) the way they ought to. I was able to sit down with DBxtra 2005 and just start working with my data with very little time spent in the manual, which is a pretty good feeling for a data manipulation tool.

DBxtrat 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. Depending on your permissions, DBxtra runs in either "Designer" or "Viewer" mode. Designer exposes the full power of the tool, while Viewer allows you to view, filter, and export objects such as queries, charts, and reports, but not to add or change objects. This lets you set up projects for less-experienced users with some assurance that they won't mess things up while they're just looking at the data.

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 query designer is improved in this version with a drag and drop relationship builder and a grid pane for filtering, grouping, and expressions, which vastly improves what was the weakest part of the previous release. The report designer gives you a complete graphical design surface for building reports, and helpfully prepopulates this with controls when you create a report from a query. In addition to viewing them, you can schedule or e-mail reports. Two other designers let you build ASP pages or charts on top of queries; they work as easily as the report designer.

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. Video tutorials in the help add to the ease of learning the product, though if you've worked with any modern desktop database design product you probably won't need most of them.

There's a 30-day trial version available for download (which continues to function in a reduced capability mode after 30 days).

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

Published January 6, 2006.