The SchemaBank Blog

After months of hard work and gallons of caffeine draining , we are now excited to announce the very new SchemaBank!

In additions to various new features in our very original web-based SB Designer. We have added an array of community features, namely:

• The Project Home Page
  • each project has its own home page showing all diagrams and schema details of the committed (aka published) versions
  • visitors can follow a project and receive daily updates on its activities
  • visitors can start and join discussion on the project home page
  • authors can tag the schema and visitors can search schema projects by tags
  • and many more!
• The Gallery
  • showing all public projects where visitors can now collaborate in full strength with the project author
  • carrying the searchable tag cloud of all public projects
  • let you search for all public projects (and those private projects that you have read access), down to field level!
• My Models
  • a handy place to create new projects and manage your existing ones
  • listing all public and private projects that you have read and write access, whether you are the author, a collaborator or a follower
  • showing your activity history in SB
• User Public Profile
  • each SB registered user now have their dedicated public profile carrying their basic bio (optional) and the public projects (and their corresponding activities) that they create and follow
  • and we now automatically grab your avatar from Gravatar

There’s so much more to tell about the new features and keep an eye on our blog  for the latest development!

Cheers ~~

Announcement, New Features collaborate, community

You may have noticed by now that each of your projects can be accessed by an unique URL. The URL is short enough for you to pass it around in twitter. The format is:

http://schemabank.com/a/the-unique-id-of-your-project

Accessing a Branch

You can also specify the branch and even the version of the schema you want to access. This will open the head version (i.e. the latest version) of the trunk branch:

Accessing a Version

And this will open version 2 of the trunk branch:

With the unique URL and the ability to share your projects for public access, people on the ‘net can locate your projects more easily.

New Features collaborate, free-plan, paid-subscription

We loudly present the new SchemaBank. But why loudly?

Because in the past few months we have been quiet and we believe the new SB worths more attention now.

We deliberately minimized the public exposure for SB. We invited some geeks to try out SB and they have mentioned very briefly in some places, which attracted quite a few batches of users coming in.

And that bought us time to work very hard since last October to bring some exciting albeit critical features to SB:

Diff report and alter scripts

You can now generate diff report between two versions of schema, nicely formatted in html and zipped for easy download.

SB also gives you the alter script to upgrade from a source version to a target version.

You surely should give it a try. We understand a perfect alter script means a flawless refactoring process. It definitely needs improvement and please let us know your feedback.

Multi-branch versioning

Branching is nothing new to many versioning systems (e.g. svn), but you can do more than forking or release management in SB using branching. You can make a branch for each developer so that we can store different stages of their working copy before they choose to commit it as a version.

One good thing about having a branch for each developer is, they can upgrade the schema of their own sandbox database using the alter scripts generated by SB, without affecting other database instances in other sandboxes or staging / production servers.

Reverse engineering

You can now import the schema of your live database and start schema management in SB. You may wonder how we could passing through your firewall to talk to your in-house database? Well, we don’t. Instead, you simple do a sql dump and upload the schema to SB. This is in fact a much easier and safer way.

Write access to shared projects

When you share you project to collaborators, you can choose if they can read and write access, which lets them to write back their working copy into your version repository.

And you may also want to know paid subsciption is now available for teams of high usage pattern.

There are plenty more new bits and pieces in terms of enhancements and bug fixes and we would love to hear from you about the new SB.

Announcement collaborate, sb-designer

Some users want us to blog on the collaboration features in SchemaBank…

And here we go, the very first one is the sharing of your database projects. It is now available under File > Share on the menu bar.

Sharing version repository for collaboration

What it does is to let you share those committed versions of your database model to authorized users. They can then see all your committed versions and load any of them into their own working copy. [Note: a working copy is the current working environment of the ER Diagram and the Text Objects tabs. You can think of a working copy as a sandbox for your design before you commit it as a version.]

In addition to viewing messages under the Notes tab, an authorized users can also participate in message submission, which makes the Project Notes tab a mini discussion forum for the database design.

A read-only sharing while saving to working copy is allowed

At this moment, the sharing is NOT only limited to only viewing of the committed versions, but not ALSO SUPPORTS checking in her own changes as a new version back to the project repository. Such feature is under construction

One thing worths mentioning though, the authorized user with read-only access can still save changes to her own working copy because that is her own sandbox environment.

Smart email invitation to team mates

InvitationTo authorize your team mates for the share, you need to supply their email addresses. If an email address matches any of our registered users, he will be notified through email. Otherwise, we will invite them (by email) to sign up for SchemaBank to join the collaboration.

Let us know how you feel about this new feature… cheers!    

New Features collaborate, sb-designer

Let me share with you how the idea of developing a collaborative web-based database modeling product was born.

Back in 2006…

The pain of traditional database modeling software

When we were doing a project using PostgreSQL, we had spent quite some time to search for a handy tool for database modeling. Most, if not all, of the tools available in the market at the time didn’t meet our simple requirements:

1. We don’t feel like installing anything because we are lazy and tired of any upgrade and patching that could potentially mess up our development machines.
2. We prefer browser-based solutions as we appreciate its cleaniness and portability across different OS platforms.
3. When we send database models for our client’s approval, we want to skip the hassle of persuading them to follow our software choice (on database modeling).
4. We want our database models accessible to our team members and our clients that may come from anywhere in the world.
5. We want the the data (i.e. the database model) served securely and with regular backup.
6. We want the tool to help us collaborate with our team members and our clients as much and easily as possible because database modeling involves team interaction and decision.

With further research, it seems the same happens to other DBMS. We were thinking, ‘Hey, it’s 2006! How come a web 2.0 version of database modeling products is yet to materialize?‘

So after months of development, together with countless espresso and English breakfast tea, here we come SchemaBank.

Challenges are still there

While we are happy to see SchemaBank goes into beta, we also recognize our simple requirements are not easy after all. I’ll share with you more behind-the-scene stories of existing and upcoming features in future postings.

No matter what though, we are determined to bring you the best that web 2.0 can offer to database modeling.

And please let us know how you feel about the beta.

Now getting back to work…

Cheers.

Announcement collaborate, sb-designer