Category Archives: Proto

xlAWS – 100,000 downloads?

Posted on April 2, 2008 | 2 Comments

Not sure, but this morning I received my monthly AWS bill, and it was double its usual amount! When I investigated the extra cost it was due to 133GBs of downloads from my www2.gobansaor.com bucket. This is the S3 bucket in which I store the xlAWS zip file, xlAWS being a “library-of-sorts” of VBA/VB6 helper code for accessing Amazon S3 and SimpleDB.

It’s linked to from this page on my blog (which has had 200 or so hits this month) and from this AWS Community Code page. The excessive hits on the bucket started on the 28th of Feb , the day the xlAWS code was published on Amazon and continued through most of March. Talking the size of the zip file, 133GB represents approximately 100,000 downloads. I don’t have server logging enabled on the bucket, so I can’t be sure how much is due to the other public files in the bucket (all belonging to the VBA/Proto SQLite xLite project), but as that project has been available for months and is accessible only through my website (who’s stats show a consistent 5-10 downloads per week) I’m guessing the downloads are for xlAWS.

Who would have though that there would be such interest in VBA/VB6 code for accessing AWS services! I wonder was it the Excel VBA side of the house or the dispossessed (and p*ssed off) VB6 developer hoards who downloaded it the most? Leave a comment if you downloaded and used the library, I’d love to know.

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Posted in AmazonAWS, programming, Proto, S3, SimpleDB, SQLite, VBA, xlAWS, xLite

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Proto – desktop BI tool.

Posted on September 9, 2007 | 1 Comment

I see that Proto have repositioned their excellent VBA scripted mash-up product as a “desktop business intelligence system”. This is to be welcomed as the first time I used it I described it as a “mash-up tool for adults” and although it has the ability to play hard ball with the other Web2.0 mash-up kids, its DNA is firmly within the business world, more BI2.0 than Web2.0. It is in effect, a “reporting tool on steroids”.

The “free for non-commercial purposes” product is no more, but you can still download a 30-day free trial and the really good news is the new price of $300 for the Proto Individual product.

Also, another business-oriented mash-up tool, RSSBus, is partially out of beta, RSSBus Server RC1 is now available. Still no information on final pricing for the server product. A new Beta 5 release of the free desktop edition is also available for download. As I’ve said before, RSSBus Server front-ended by Proto would be a very powerful combination.

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Posted in ETL, news, Proto, RSSBus, VBA, xLite

Apatar – a few extracts short of a load

Posted on July 12, 2007 | 4 Comments

I’ve been meaning to try out the Apatar ETL/Mashup tool for sometime and today being yet another rainy day in this the worst Irish summer that I can remember (and Irish summers are not renowned for the lack of rainfall) I decided to give it a try out. Not impressed I’m afraid; comes up short when compared to either Kettle (Pentaho PDI), Proto, RSSBus or Talend. Very few database connectors (e.g. no SQLite,DB2 or Firebird support) this wouldn’t be a problem if the product offered a generic JDBC or ODBC connector. It does have one nice feature the others (other than RSSBus) haven’t, an Amazon S3 connector. But the thing that I find amazing is that a product that’s positioning itself as an Enterprise 2.0. mashup tool doesn’t have the ability to read and write Excel files! And no, CSV files don’t count.

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Posted in BI, data, ETL, excel, kettle, Proto, RSSBus, SQLite, Talend

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Google Gears – SQLite Killer App

Posted on May 31, 2007 | 1 Comment

The announcement of Google Gears is of course a game changer for those working in the development of online apps; its addition to Goggle Reader alone would make it worth while for me and I’m sure we’ll see it integrated into Google Docs and GMail in the near future. If you had any plans to develop a web based app or already deploy one you need to give this technology some quality time.

But it is the use of SQLite as the client-side persistence engine that excites this datasmith’s old heart. Since first coming across SQLite (while learning Ruby on Rails) I’ve been convinced that this “good enough” micro-database on steroids was a winner. Since then, as well as using it with Ruby ,I’ve integrated it with excel to use as a micro-ETL tool, I was instrumental in getting SQLite support added to Kettle (Pentaho PDI), I wrote a SQLite custom module for Proto, in fact the first thing I now do when checking out a data manipulation tool is to check if it supports SQLite.

I’m looking forward to investigating further what Google Gears can add to my existing datasmithing tool set, and I’m certainly glad I invested the time in learning JavaScript. Exciting times.

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Posted in ETL, excel, JavaScript, kettle, Proto, SQLite

What’s up Docs & Spreadsheets?

Posted on April 18, 2007 | Leave a comment

Google Spreadsheets now supports simple graphs and named ranges; see the announcement on the google-d-s.blogspot.com blog. I’ve also just noticed that my Google Apps account now includes Docs & Spreadsheets; finally I can move my business documents from my private GMail account into Goggle Apps. Looks like a presentation tool is also on the way.

This confirmation of Google’s continued commitment to D&S is opportune as I had decided a few weeks ago to invest some time finally getting my head around GData, in particular, the Spreadsheets and Calendar APIs. I investigated the APIs using VBA, as my main interest in interfacing with GoogleD&S & Calendar is as a back-end to Excel; i.e. using Excel as the front-end heavy duty data tool and Google Apps as the collaboration and orchestration tool (and Amazon S3 as the back-end data store). But I didn’t use VBA within Excel, instead as I was also investigating Proto I used this excellent Proto example as my starting point.

NOTE:

Proto Discount:

Byron Binkley CEO of Proto has kindly offered a total of 50 licenses (until July 13th 2007) at $79.50, a 90% discount to the listed price for Proto Individual (http://www.protosw.com/products/purchase). The offer applies to anybody mentioning this http://gobansaor.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/proto/blog post. I have no connection financial or otherwise with Proto Software, just a fan of the product.

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Posted in ETL, excel, GAFyD, news, Proto

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