Relational databases

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 11, 2015 at 10:12 AM

I know the whole concept appears to have died a death nowadays: for the few people who still use relational databases in smaller businesses, FileMaker Pro reigns supreme. Some poor, unfortunate souls still use Access, or even Excel. But on the whole, relational databases have ceased to be a major force on the desktop or among smaller businesses – various SaaS solutions have replaced them.

However, as we seek to move away from FileMaker (now simply too expensive to justify long-term investment), I have discovered another solution: Ninox. The latter is available as a single-user desktop version that syncs with iOS versions over iCloud. But it is also available as a server version, available for both MacOS and Windows, and accessed via web browser: precisely the scenario we are currently using via FileMaker for our virtual team. The price is very reasonable, the software appears, so far, to be rather good, if somewhat lacking in clear user guidance (but it’s not difficult to use). It has some useful functions, too, such as rich-text fields and full-text/all-field searching.

The desktop/iOS combo alone is worth looking at if you’re a single user in need of some powerful data management functionality. But we’ll be testing out the server version, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

More on Ninox at: https://ninoxdb.de/ninox/en/ (yes, it’s a German product).

Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 11, 2015 at 11:16 AM

That’s interesting, Bill. I look forward to hearing more.

The documentation discusses importing CSV and Bento. (Who in the world still has actively-managed Bento databases?). Not import from native FileMaker or SQL databases. So, I assume the database import process requires exporting CSVs from FileMaker with appropriate keys and then somehow making Ninox rebuild the keys and generate the joins. (The documentation says the proces is “equal roughly” to SQL—which implies Ninox is probably not using standards. A possible lock-in issue if one has to migrate off Ninox in the future.)

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Tableau recently—I wonder if a NInox instance would be usable as a Tableau data source.

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