DBArtisan Beta

The reason I haven't been very active on my blog is because I have been busy working on the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta. This release is different from previous releases in a lot of way, probably most noticeably is the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta doesn't have a major new feature, rather the theme is about improving feature quality and bunch of small features that just make life better. For instance one feature I absolutely love is introduction of check boxes. Gone are the annoying true/false selection. Anyhow there are piles of new things including support for new database versions like Sybase Cluster, SQL Server 2008, Oracle 11g, DB2 9.5, migration improvements and host of improvements. Plus for the first time we are using some new beta software so you can read more about all the new improvements at beta.embarcadero.com. This site is also going to allow you to communicate with each other on just how great this beta is or log and track your issues online. The cool thing about the beta site is we have surveys so you can help guide us as to when this is ready to ship.

Please join the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta now and be part of the action.

Value of Work Flow

These days it is hard to attract people to your software based on appearance. That isn't to say that appearance isn't important or that people won't make decisions based on appearance. However it is hard to convince someone to try a piece of software if your claims are about appearance, usability, work flow, etc. This is because these terms have been so often misused and everyone will indicate they have superior user experience. The reason I bring this up is I was playing around with the new Change Manager 5.0.1 release and was doing a comparisons so that I could determine the permission difference on a set of tables. Well it didn't work right away. Fortunately I quickly noticed that "Ignore Object Permissions" was selected in the Options selection. After deselecting and re-executing I got the desired result. While I was marvelling over how useful knowing how permissions have changed and how easy it was for me to resolve my issue it dawned on me how little I notice the rest of the setup. From narrowing to tables, though the mapping to finally seeing the result a lot of very exacting refinements were done without really having to think about it. The tool guiding me through a very complex task to results I wanted to see. Anyhow the net result was me thinking, wow that is a great experience we should be telling people about. So as I was seeing the "Great User Experience" headline I signed and realized that would never work. So how do you promote something like work flow?