DBxtra Erfahrungen

Have been using it for 5 years, and now purchased another licence again for a new system.
Features we use:
Designer on server=yes
Designer by users =no
Data grids=yes
Pivot grids=yes
Reports (ie using designer)=yes
Scheduled server=once
Dashboard=no
It doesn't do _everything_ but in terms of basic data grid, reports, pivot it's very good. This is because it's built on DevExpress report designer which is as solid reporting tool.
Essentially the core requirements for reporting, ie user-based variables, parameter customisation, user group security, good web based reporting interface are very good.
It is excellent value for money when compared to other reporting tools on the market, which can easily span into the $10k upwards.
For me, the primary reason is the ease of use for creating and deploying reports. Once I have my SQL query created, just paste it into the designer, save the report, set permissions and you're done. For simple reports I can create them in 5-10 minutes, so that's extremely helpful when managmenet is on your tail to get something sorted. :-)

Pros:
Inexpensive
Powerful and feature rich
Web deployment capability
Tech support

Cons:
Memory and processing hog. Make sure you have a powerful computer when developing or it will crash far too often.
Doesn't have many bugs but the ones it does are very annoying and impede the use of some features
Very slow to fix bugs
Poor documentation (really poor - you have to contact technical support to learn how to do anything sophisticated)
Last release was extremely poorly conceived, delivered, and poorly communicated. They eliminated some good features and the upgrade wreaked havoc on our installation. We had to downgrade (which is not easy) and rebuild everything. Consequently we are very gun shy about upgrading and are still waiting months later for them to repair the damage form this release.
Examples:
The parameters window no longer displays by default
The output display is limited a window that is too small for some of our wider reports so now there are 2 sets of scroll bars
The moved the function buttons from top right to top left so our logo is crowded between the buttons and the report and looks terrible.
Product management needs a serious overhaul. Both because of the above bumbling and a number of features in the UI that are just plain bad design and need to be removed or fixed. For example:
Displaying the report parameters in a cryptic string in the report header without the option to hide them. Users don't need to see this and if you have a lot of parameters the result is a very long string which detracts from the report aesthetics.
You cannot have report parameters that are strings with commas, such as a company name as it does not work. You have to work around it in a non-elegant way to get it to work. This bug has been outstanding for more than a year. There is a similar problem with strings that contain single quotes (given that this is a SQL based report system you'd think the programmers would have had a clue about this).
If you customize the display of parameters in the report (so you don't get the non-user-friendly cryptic string) every time you edit the report your customizations are overwritten with that ridiculous string. You have to save your customization in a hidden field and copy and paste it back every time.

Note: All of the above has already been communicated to DBXtra. We are still awaiting a resolution.

I see the Features Checklist saying that DBxtra supports OLAP. This is simply not true. You will not find any mention of OLAP support on DBxtra website or documentation besides this news article dating back to 2008: http://www.dbxtra.com/blog/?p=103
DBxtra can't use SSAS or similar OLAP tools as a data source. The built in table pivoting doesn't have multidimensional data processing functionality.

So far I'm having pretty rough experience with DBxtra. After working with it for a month I'm running into numerous bugs and minor annoyances: slow initial load time, various UI elements not working. Customer Support response is very quick, but they can't really solve any of my issues or provide estimates for resolution. Well I guess it's what you get for this kind of price.

We did a substantial amount of market testing before deciding on which product to settle on.

We needed to improve the quality of our reports, make data easier to understand for our end users and reduce the development time associated with report generation.

We evaluated a number of other competitors. We found the service to be reasonable with most of the companies we evaluated. In some products, we found very advanced features, but the development cycle would require lots of coding. We were looking for a solution that would steamline the report creation process and offer a powerful set of tools for visualising and presenting data back.

After we became disillusioned with the 4th product we tried, we moved over to testing DBxtra.

With DBxtra we had created and deployed our first report in less than 3 days (compared to over 7 with the other products)

DBxtra works like this: You build an underlying query using a visual query builder - from this you effectively have 4 separate methods of manipulating the data:

- Data Grids

- Pivot Tables

- Reports

- Dashboards

Go the website to see these.

But why am I actually writing this review?

During our testing of this product, the service and support we received was literally the best we've experienced. The friendly and experienced team at DBxtra never made us wait long for an answer to a support email and on a number of occasions they screen shared with us to provide advice. In about 5 situations, our requirements needed code changes in asp pages. Each time, they went away, researched our problem and came back and implemented it for us.

As part of our purchase we agreed on some customization work that needed to be done at short notice. We were a little worried about whether the quality of the service would drop off after we paid. When our customisation was not completed we sent an email to ask what was going on at 23:00 - only to get an instant reply to say that it had taken longer than planned due to a major storm, but they were staying with it until it was done. It was completed at around 02:00 - and was done so because the DBxtra team understood we needed it for showcase to a client the next morning and they delivered on their promise.

That's all there is to say really.

We have used DBXTRA for over 5 years with a national user base accessing through IIS. Our customers love the simplicity of the UI, the rich features and we love the reliability and support.

We highly recommend this product!

The ROI for this product is incredible when compared to other database reporting tools such as, Crystal, SAP, Cognos and Business Objects, etc. I would recommend this product to anyone that may have multiple versions of a database, such as SQL, Oracle, DB2, Informix, Access, etc because of its ability to handle different versions of a database and produce professional reports quickly.

I've found DBxtra far quicker to develop, test, and roll out to end users than either MS Business Intelligence or Oracle.

I also like the fact that end users can easily learn it and create their own custom queries and reports. It takes a tremendous amount of workload off of IT when users are in a "I'll know it when I see it" mode.

Overall I would and have recommended DBxtra to fellow business owners and clients.

I would recommend DBxtra to anyone who needs an easy to use reporting package with lots of functionality but who finds other products expensive or overly complex.

We implemented DbXtra as visual dynamic reporting alternative, we realized that helped our organization to have valuable information across processes and areas without development constraints and best in value, the benefit/cost ratio compared with other Visual Reporting Tools is very high. Something to improve is about web client features. Still great for basic Analytics.

As a distributor of DBxtra in Denmark, Key2Mobility delivers DBxtra to new customers as well as our existing customer base running our Mobile Field Service Management solution PreCom.
We have found DBxtra to be very powerful and flexible. The solution is easy and intuitive to use for simple reporting requirements, at the same time offering advanced reporting and analyse facilities to more professional users.
DBxtra s structured use of projects, connections and objects including powerful export and import facilities makes it easy for Key2Mobility to professionally deliver added value on top of the reporting tool.
Especially DBxtra s ability to run on several data sources makes the solution useful in larger organizations as a central reporting tool for consolidation of data from different systems.

Almost 6 years I using this solution for complex requirements and also limited budget.
Users really happy cause all thing related with this solution are easy.
Even for beginner developer without good basic for programming can easily setting this solution.
Thank you DBxtra!!!!!!

After reviewing many alternatives, we selected DBxtra to publish our in-house data onto the web.
Implementation was straightforward, and we're publishing complex dashboards within a couple of days.
Too many features to comment on, but one we find excellent is the User / Group variables. These allow us to easily publish a single dashboard to our 60 suppliers, with the data displayed restricted to their login details
The online documentation covers the basics. For further instructions, you email support. The support team is impressive. All emails were replied to on the same day, with detailed and relevant instructions.
Overall, I am very impressed.

We have been using DBxtra for over a year now. It performs well and has become a standard in our organization. We researched many products and found that virtually all others were outside of our price range or too low on features to work. We wanted a tool that didn't take a developer to run and manage. A tool that created rich web reports with the usual exports. DBxtra simply does it all it even will schedule reports to be run and sent as emails (very handy).
Since any review without "cons" I will supply the few we have found.

1. Some of the components are not as intuitive as you would expect, however once learned they are fine.
2. If you are interested in graphing as I am definitely take it for a test drive first. The graphing works well but there needs to be better control of labels.

Finally DBxtra needs some polishing as does all software all the time but it is money well spent and we plan on being a customer for a very long time.

We've been looking for a reporting tool that has the flexibility for end users to modify the query criteria, sorting, and grouping data. DBxtra's data grid just provides all these capabilities. And it is easy to use. This is a great product and I recommend it to other users. It would be great if the free report viewer has an authentication mechanism. Currently, any user can double-click the report file on a disk drive to open it if the user can access the disk drive. Another thing is that the web version of the dashboard doesn't look as good as the windows version.

If you need a reporting system that is powerful, flexible and easy to use at all levels of user experience, this is it.

After searching and trialling many different reporting software DBxtra is not only the most affordable and easy to use, it also has extensive features that challenge most of the more expensive reporting software.

It is already 3 years we use DBxtra as our main reporting solution.
We were looking for a tool that could show reports like excell does with a pivot table.
SQL is somehow limited in that because you cannot really have a presentation layer for the data you collect and therefore a report is very repetitive and static.
DBxtra let you create reports that can be viewed online and let you see a summarized account of the data while letting you to go down to a detailed view if needed.
The interface is easy enough to have a secretary create the report in very few time.
I'd like also to point out that the customer service is very competent and quick to answer finding a way to help you out with any use or configuration problem that could arise.

As a consulting firm, we are always looking for software to use in our projects and make our life easier. We came across DBxtra like 6 years ago, and since then it has solved a lot of our problems.
Our customers usually have the data, but they need a simple and affordable way to analyze it. That´s were DBxtra comes in with simple reporting, graphics, dynamic tables, and what I like the most, schedule server. For us, that´s what the customer wants, not depending on anyone for his data.
The only thing I wanted them to include, was a dashboard, and they have already done it.

In a few words, all our customers and ourselves, feel that we got a lot of value for what we paid.

- I think I made the correct decision with DBXtra... It really saves us tons of heartache, headache, ..., stomachache.
- DBXtra rocks

We trust DBxtra so much that we let DBxtra runs LIVE reporting of our system that is fed with records every 5 seconds from our devices. We showed to our client and they were dazzled of DBxtra's features and importantly the stability of DBxtra that we achieved in our setup. We told them DBxtra did all the work unattended to produce the online LIVE reporting that could be drilled down to the last hour. Soon enough, we got the purchase order from this client as well as other projects and thanks to DBxtra for its hard work that helped us to win this client. Now we trust DBxtra even more ... to tackle our next client.

We deliver mobile computing solutions on iPad and Android tablets and have been using DBxtra for nearly 10 years as our chosen reporting tool. It is easy to use and capable of connecting to multiple Database platforms. The web reporting and scheduler enable us and our clients to access valuable up to date information about their field operations activities and for us to automatically deliver scheduled management reports by email in order to provide highly pro-active information to managers. Overall DBxtra is a simple to use but powerful reporting tool without the complexity of other far more expensive solutions.

Golden Corral has been using the DBxtra reporting tool for at least 6 years. For small shops such as ours, it greatly increases productivity by providing a truly non programming environment IDE for creating visually appealing reports. Our end users use the reporting server daily to access reports and pass parameter filters to custom select report data. The scheduler is also a tool we rely on daily to produce and email reports to a variety of departments within the company. As the software manager, my very first requirement of a new programmer in my department is to learn DBxtra.

Now IT is backbone for Company and expected to deliver perfect services with limited budget. Specially at reporting solution with limited budget IT should fine solutions.
DBxtra as like "hero" for IT leader with limited resources and knowledge to deliver reporting application.
For user point of view is very user friendly as they using spreadsheet application.
This application is very helpful and easy implementation with big benefits.

We've been using DBxtra for nearly a year and have found it to be an invaluable tool. It has really allowed our project to progress rapidly by providing a fast way to write custom reports and provide access to helpful business intelligence data on the fly.

We love the dashboard reports! Showing our clients interactive data visualization with real-time data has been a god-send.

We reviewed several possible solutions before deciding on DBxtra. It has outperformed all them from ease of set-up, ease of use and cost. We highly recommend it.