I’ll give it a go and report any bugs we find.
Todd

What I would do is have a Customer category (table) with contact information fields, and an Order category with fields for Date, Item, Quantity, Amount and Customer (a “Link to Entry” field of category Customer).

To get the results you want, I would then start with a view of all the Orders. I would then add a column for Amount, and use the column header control to add a filter, which I would set at >10. I would then add a column for Customer, and again using the column header control, add a “derived field” column for “Customer -> State”. I would then add a filter for this derived field the same way I added the Amount filter, with value “TX”. All done.

A few important things to note here:

* Dabble doesn’t make you think about primary or foreign keys for relations — you don’t need to have that shared Email field, you can just explicitly have a Customer field on Order.

* The query is built up incrementally, giving you useful intermediate results along the way. This can make querying a much more accessible thing to do than it would be with something like SQL.

We’re trying to make Dabble powerful, yet leave behind a lot of what traditional relational databases force you think about. For those who don’t know what a foreign key is, this often comes pretty easily. For those used to jumping through RDBMS hoops, there can sometimes be a tendency to try to make things harder than they need to be, but they’re usually quite happy to see how simple it can be.

Cheers, Andrew

I took a look and I do see the relationship feature now. Sorry for missing it. I’ll update the piece. Below is the kind of scenario I am talking about:

Say I have one Access table that contains contact info for customers. I have another table with orders from the customers (Email, Date, Item, Quantity, etc.). The two tables are tied together by the email address. In the order table a single email address could have multiple orders (so rows). Once a relationship between the tables is established, I want to be able to run searches on both tables and see merged results. So I might run a query on orders from people in TX that were for more than $10 after December 1, 2005.

In Access, sometimes you have to resort to a SQL query to accomplish this. It wasn’t immediately evident to me in Dabble how I would do something like this, but I need to spend more time looking at it.

Regardless, I love Dabble.

Todd

For advanced queries, I’d love some examples of queries that you can’t do now but would like to be able to.

Website forms is a feature we’d definitely like to have. We’re piloting an initial version of this with some users but haven’t gotten it to the point of releasing it more generally yet.

For data publication, you might be interested in the JSON export that we just added – if you save a view and go to the exports page, you can get a URL which can be used to load data from Dabble into another website’s DOM. I’ll post more on this when we have some example uses fleshed out.

Thanks again for taking the time to post, your feedback is very much appreciated.