Friday, November 28, 2008

HanDBase: A database for the masses, an interview with DDH Software CEO, Dave Haupert

HanDBase is a relational database originally designed to run on Palm PDAs. Today versions run on most major handheld platforms and on Windows. While it is not as “full featured” as the big-system databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and DB2, it has several advantages that are becoming increasingly important as computing moves onto handheld platforms. First, it is purposely simple enough that power users can learn to build applications on top of it, and many have. DDH Software offers quite a few of these apps as free downloads on its Web site, which gives an idea of what can be done with it. Many more, however, have been built by company employees both in and outside of IT organizations to improve internal processes, and many of them are now being used across organizations of every size. Second, because HanDBase runs on all the major handheld platforms, an application built on it will also run across all those platforms. This can be a major advantage to corporate IT, which today is often struggling to support multiple handheld platforms. Third, it delivers a high degree of security, to the extent that several large medical centers use it. And fourth, because it is at heart a database, applications built on it can run independently when network connectivity is unavailable but can also exchange data with large systems such as CRM, ERP, and longitudinal patient record software, when it is. This minimizes the intermittent connectivity problem inherent in mobile computing.

Read the interview here.

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