by Jennifer Collins under QuickBase Advice & Tips

We’ve had several customers come to us recently with questions about backing up data so we thought we’d 1) share with you some information about what we do and 2) give you some advice on what you can do to ensure your data is safe.

 First, we thought we’d share what we do about backups. The safety of your data is as important to us as it is to you and to that end we perform regular backups of all the information you store in QuickBase.  We maintain those backups on your behalf to protect you in the event that anything happens to our servers.  So if we do something to cause data loss, then we’ve got you covered and will restore your data at no cost to you.

Second, if you want to take matters into your own hands, there are several things you can do to add additional protection from any mistakes you or your team make.  More specifically:

1)      You can subscribe to our “restore package”.  Think of this as an insurance policy against your team making a mistake.  Once you’ve upgraded your subscription to include this add-on, then all you need to do is request a previous version of your data by submitting a support case at any time.   The additional cost of this is $50 per month and it allows you to request up to 4 restores per year.  If you don’t want to sign up for the “restore pack” and you need a restore, we still can do it, but we will need to charge you $1000 for that. The reason we end up having to charge for this is because there are many ways people mess their applications up (e.g. deleting tables, deleting single fields, etc) and restores can be quite time consuming.  If you want help purchasing the “restore package”, just submit a support case and we’ll walk you through it.

2)      You can make regular copies of your data.  This can be done manually by creating a copy of your application, or you can automate it by making a call to the API_CloneDatabase API call.  For more information on the API call, checkout our API documentation.

3)      You can leverage QuickBase Desktop, a utility that sync’s QuickBase data to Microsoft Access.  For more information on that, you can read our knowledgebase article.

Please feel free to reach out to the support team if you have any questions or want some advice on which approach might be best for you.  We hope this helped.

by Peter Fearey under Uncategorized

Intuit is quite committed to helping people save money, get more customers and save time.    To that end, the company recently launched a “Small Business United” initiative.  We on the QuickBase team share in the company’s desire to do what we can to help people in the crazy time we currently live in.  To that end, we’ve been working with our awesome partner, O’Reilly Media,  to find a way to help people save money…and we’ve come up with a great way of doing it…

…to give people a 60% discount on QuickBase: Missing Manual during the month of February! For those that don’t know, this 450 page book is an amazing resource of tips and tricks about developing QuickBase applications.

So, if you’re interested in getting a copy, all you have to do is go to their site and purchase the book.  During checkout you will have the opportunity to enter a “Discount code”, just enter “QBYE6”.  This will save you $29.99 and you’ll be getting the book for $20 (plus shipping)   Don’t forget, this promotion will only last through the month of February. 

Enjoy the savings!

by achakmakjian under QuickBase Advice & Tips

Even as a manager of the QuickBase software development team I still get impressed every day with the little things you can do in QuickBase to add value to whatever problem you are solving.  I needed to add color to a QuickBase that I’m using to manage a process on our team.  I know about Row Colorization that is invokable for any report.  Row Colorization, while quite effective, can be rather stark when you have lots of columns, and you may want to use a report to indicate more than one color.  For example, you may want to show that task is in trouble by saying it is currently red, but you may also want to indicate that the trend is green.  Row colorization doesn’t really allow that kind of information.    Also, if you have a multi-line text field in one of the columns (let’s say an append only field with history), you could get into a situation where you have this huge block of red, but really it’s just one item.   I suppose you could hide the field, write a formula field that summarized the append only field et cetera.

In my case I did want to show the current status and the trend, so I would need two different colors.  I poked around the Online Help and found a little feature that really makes a report pop, and allows you to indicate more info on one row than a single color.   You can find more info in the Online Help topic  Color the background of a Field using HTML

What you see here is that we have a simple to do list that allows us to assign a status to that item.  For fun I have assigned Green, Yellow and Red to our ability to get those things done. The problem here is that I can read Red, but I don’t see Red.  and having that whole line Red would hide the text (unless I changed it to white for example)

I think it would look much better if I could just change the color of the cell in status, so I could look like this:

Actually what I did was quite simple.   Any text cell can have its background color changed based on the contents by allowing HTML tags to be set in the field properties.  But that’s where I ran into a little hitch.  I can only do that with text and formula text field, but QuickBase doesn’t allow that for multiple choice fields.   So I got around that by creating a second forumula text field that had the colorization in it as you can see in the picture below.

And the settings for the status color field are here:

Notice that the HTML checkbox is checked and that the formula checks the value of the corresponding “status” field and uses the case statement to give you the color.  The html text formula is the following:

Case([Status],
“Green”, “<div style=\”background-color:Green;\”> Green</div>”,
“Yellow”,”<div style=\”background-color:Yellow;\”> Yellow</div>”,
“Red”, “<div style=\”background-color:Red;\”> Red</div>”,
“”)

BTW be careful with the quotes.  Make sure that they are not the stylized quotes but the plain double quote next to the Return/Enter key on your keyboard.  A couple of my other blog posts got messy with the stylized quotes but they seem to be correct here.

Now the cute things about this is the way that the actual form handles those fields.   Basically you have a pulldown in the form for Red Yellow and Green, and a separate entry for the forumula field, which will change color as you change the text field.   What I did in my real app and not this toy app was place the formula field at the top of the default form so that visually, the first thing you see for any record if you view or edit it is the color of the status.  Down near date fields and append-only text description fields below, I put the pulldown.

Also as you see above, I hid the pulldown field in the second picture.  This also means that Grid Edit won’t allow you to change the color unless you 1. add the field before going into grid edit or 2. make the default grid edit form contain both fields.  I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

As I said in my problem statement above, I needed two fields with color to both give the immediate and the trend status option to the project managers.  As you can tell, having both colors up there (lets say red status and yellow trend) might give people an indication of an improving situation or in reverse a deteriorating situation.   You can also use this for things other that status such as credits/debits (red and black…then you’ll definitely need the special incantation for white lettering in the Online Help), weather reporting (white for snow, yellow for sunny, gray for rain) or whatever color scheme suits you.

BTW the QuickBase online help has all this information in it, so happy coloring…

Armen

by CustomerSupport: ChongLim Kim under Industry Trends

It’s Friday January 30, 9:25 A.M. as I start this blog.  Ever wondered what a roomful of 150 database uber aficionados get excited about? I’m about to find out while waiting for the delayed start of the 2nd New England Database Day at MIT’s Stata Center. Why am I even here? I had thought QuickBase might be too well kept a secret among database professionals, and had proposed to present a poster session on QuickBase architecture and customer use examples for this event. After encouragement and support from various QuickBase managers, I was further gratified to get personal interest to help from Jim Salem, QuickBase Architect, and Liz McCann, QuickBase Senior Marketing Manager; both provided the content for the poster.

I’ll do a separate blog on our poster; here, I thought I’d touch on some of the database research topics from the day’s speakers that might be of interest to the business technical users of QuickBase. The following are not meant to be summaries, but are just notes I took during the speakers’ presentations.

Prof. Mike Franklin, UC Berkeley and Truviso, Inc. “Continuous Analytics: Supercharging Query Performance with Stream Processing.” Not real-time query processing; stream processing. The research vision: classical “store-first” database is not ideal for business analytics of net-centric data. Want lower latency; but driver today is data volume growth. This is one of the two key-note topics for the conference and seems interesting to me in light of current interest in web user behaviorial analytics.

“Deep Web Search with Morpheus.” Example use case: How much is house at 44 Xxxxx Road, Manchester, NH, worth? Can use willow.com website; fill in form for site to generate information. Another example: I need a 3* hotel for less than $150 in Cambridge, MA. Can use hotels.com, and again ask question through form on web site. But data behind web forms is not visible to search engine. Morpheus — wrapper of user defined functions (that replicate a user filling in the web forms). The next web search frontier…?

Asst. Prof. Daniel Abadi, Yale University. “Data Management in the Cloud: Limitations and Opportunities.” (As an aside, Dan’s talk included an entertaining discourse on a post from The Database Column, a multi-author blog on database technology and innovation: ‘MapReduce – A major step backwards’ by Prof. David DeWitt and Prof. Michael Stonebraker.) If want milk, one can buy a cow, or buy bottled milk. Buying computer to host a database app is like buying a cow. Cloud Computing is like buying bottled milk. Data analysis applications more suited for cloud computing than transaction oriented applications. Food for thought…

David Karger, MIT CSAIL. “Baseless! Why the Best Database is No Database.” Proposal: Low performance database; object relational model; weak/no type checking; semi-structured data; simple queries only; direct manipulation; do not disclose existence of database; learn from user, not make user learn databases. “Exhibit“, a tool built at CSAIL for Database “Backed” Web Sites. Any topic on making databases easy to use naturally would grab my attention…

Alon Halevy, Google. “Structured data on the Web: where we are and where we can go.” Hypothesis: there are new opportunities for data management on the web if we focus on collaboration and lightweight tools. Topic: Deep-Web Crawl… three flavors. 1. Vertical search: a single domain; data integration techniques (e.g. Transformic, Morpheus); goal: close a transaction, or show related items, reviews, etc. 2. Search for anything; goal: drive traffic to relevant sites. 3. Product search; in-between above two. Topic: WebTables — a web-scale collection of tables; data is interesting, but there is much more in the structure itself: attribute correlation; synonym discovery. Topic: Organizing Query Results by Aspects: e.g. Kosmix; using dimensions to organize search results. This is the other key-note talk for the conference; always good to keep up with what Google is up to…