In Zoho Reports (Zoho DB & Reports service to be renamed as Zoho Reports soon…), we have rolled out Folders support to organize the reports you create in a better way. Also, to enable better navigation we now have ‘Explorer’ (Windows Explorer like) tab, which provides a detailed view of each report and tables present in a database. Explorer tab will be the default tab that would be shown when you open a database. 

 

 

Highlighting features of Folders include:

• Support for creating Folders by the database owner. Folders can also be created by users who are present in the DB Group of that database
• ‘Tables & Reports’ will be the default folder created. This cannot be currently deleted or renamed
• You can move reports across any folder using the ‘Move Folder’ option (Drag and Drop to be supported soon…)
• When you share a report under a folder, the folder will also appear to the shared user. Within the folder only the reports shared to the user will appear
• Apart from folder based organization, we also support ‘Group By Related Views’ and ‘Group by Report Type’

Hope you find this useful to organize your reports better. Give it a try and let us know your feedbacks.

Clarence
Zoho Reports - Online Reporting and Business Intelligence

 

Popularity: 5% [?]

As far as computer languages go, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a pretty old one. It came to light in the early 1970s and it is probably not too popular with the Facebook generation. But the fact remains - SQL is a pretty awesome thing. It is by far one of the easiest and most efficient ways to query and interact with structured data. That’s why it remains by far one of the most heavily used languages for business applications.

But perhaps the most important role that SQL plays is that it makes developers think with a relational model in mind - and that means thinking about the best data structures for the application at hand. That’s a good thing. When developing applications -and particularly when developing business applications- the most important things are the data and the structures the data is stored in, not the application logic. Rob Pike, one of the original creators of UNIX, came up with an elegant maxim for this:

In this era of distributed file systems and cloud computing, traditional databases are being used less and less, in favor of other data storage and retrieval methods. And that has led to improved, faster and more responsive web applications. But while there are some SQL-like approaches for cloud computing out there, they tend to be fairly limited and not as powerful as the full-blown SQL - in particular because it doesn’t take into account the intricate data relationships that SQL so elegantly describes.

The problem is, there’s a fundamental mistake people make when they think of SQL: they think of the access language and the storage mechanism as one and the same. But they can in fact be separated. SQL can be just a pure access language used to describe the data and relationships being accessed. The backend (the engine that actually handles and stores the data) can be anything.

That’s why today we’re announcing a new Zoho technology. It is a milestone for accessing data on the cloud through the familiar SQL language. We have aptly named this Zoho CloudSQL.

Zoho CloudSQL is a middleware technology that allows customers to interact with their business data stored in Zoho through the familiar SQL language. Customers are able to access Zoho cloud data using SQL on both other cloud applications as well as through traditional on-premises software.

At a high-level, Zoho CloudSQL serves as the bridge between the external application and the data stored inside Zoho. It receives the query in SQL, interprets it, delegates queries and aggregates results across the Zoho services.

There are in particular 3 things that stand out about Zoho CloudSQL:

1. It’s the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.
2. It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.
3. With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.

The next natural question is: What Zoho services you can access through Zoho CloudSQL? Today we’re starting with Zoho Reports, our on-line reporting and business intelligence service, and soon other relevant Zoho services will follow-suit. Zoho Reports (which used to be called Zoho DB & Reports) also added a new Web API today.

Zoho CloudSQL also underscores Zoho’s commitment to never lock-in customers through the artificial retention of their data. Customers trust Zoho with their data because they know they can get it out anytime, through a variety of clearly documented and accessible means.

And just in case you were wondering - yes, Zoho CloudSQL is meant for developers, not end-users. So if this is the first time you’re hearing about SQL dialects and JDBC drivers, well, Zoho CloudSQL is probably not for you. But hey, it’s never too late to get started!

Get more details about Zoho CloudSQL.

Rodrigo Vaca

Popularity: 9% [?]

We added a new feature to Zoho DB & Reports - Embedding Interactive Charts in your website/blog.

I am not sure about you, but I love the charts in Zoho DB & Reports. Its not just the ease of chart creation, but the ability to drill down to view the data behind the chart and the visual highlight on a mouse-over etc are very useful. These interactive charts can be viewed inside Zoho DB, but when you embed these charts in web pages, blogs etc, the interactivity is lost. Check out our Olympics Dashboard or iPhone Reports for example where the charts are not completely interactive.

Our recent update changes this. You can now embed Zoho DB & Report’s interactive charts in webpages, blogs etc. The commonwealth dashboard now shows the interactive charts in action. Here is an embedded interactive chart from our 2008 Olympics Database.

Tip: Move your mouse on the label on the right to see the highlight. Click on the data points to see underlying data.

Embedding an interactive chart is very easy. Select the chart you want to embed and select ‘Embed in Website/Blog’ option under the Publish option. In the dialog, the default option is ‘Embed as Interactive Chart’. Copy and Paste the given code in your website/blog and you’ll see an interactive chart like the one above. You can also let users change the type of chart embedded by enabling the Toolbar option in the embed dialog. If you enable this option, the same chart will look like this with options to change the chart type.

Tip: The chart icons on the Toolbar changes the chart type and the ‘Other Charts’ button has more Chart options.

We hope you’ll find this feature useful. Please share your feedback.

Popularity: 11% [?]

You might recall the Beijing Olympics 2008 Dashboard that we did recently using Zoho DB & Reports, which was well received. Coming to know about Zoho DB & Reports through this Dashboard, we were contacted by the Official website hosting partner of Commonwealth Youth Games 2008, which is currently being held in Pune, India between 12th-18th October 2008.

They offered us the opportunity to host the Official Reports and Statistics of the Youth Commonwealth Games 2008 in their Website using Zoho DB & Reports. We readily accepted the invitation and worked with them to bring out the Reports and Statistics of the games using Zoho DB & Reports.

Checkout the same @   http://www.cygpune2008.com/graphical-reports/cygpune2008-report.php.
Games official website: http://www.cygpune2008.com (Navigate to the “Results Statistics”" section from the home page to view the reports)

We would like to thank Dimakh Consultants, the official website hosting partner of Commonwealth Youth Games 2008 for providing this opportunity.

Hope you like it. Lets us know your feedback’s on the same. Also feel free to contact us (support at zohodb dot com), in case you require any help in solving your reporting needs of your business using Zoho DB & Reports. We would be more than happy to help you out.

Thanks,
Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

Popularity: 17% [?]

Integrating the powerful reporting & analytics functionality of Zoho DB & Reports into Zoho Creator has been one of the most requested feature. We have heard it and enabled the first step towards this goal.

In Zoho DB & Reports we have introduced the feature of scheduled periodic import of CSV files from any accessible Web URL. With this feature you could setup Zoho DB & Reports to periodically fetch data in CSV format from any accessible Web URL. This would be really useful in scenarios where you have new data being published or updated periodically and you would like get those updates inside Zoho DB & Reports for reporting and analysis. Till now you had to re-import this data manually into Zoho DB & Reports, every time an update is available. Now you just have to setup up the periodic import feature and Zoho DB & Reports would do the rest for you.

With this feature you could also (enable Zoho DB & Reports to) periodically fetch data from your Zoho Creator Application into Zoho DB & Reports as changes happen to the same. As the latest data is made available inside Zoho DB & Reports, you could create any type of powerful reports with it. The reports created using Zoho DB & Reports could also be embedded back inside your Zoho Creator application using the new HTML Page view feature introduced in Zoho Creator 3.0

The following presentation demonstrates how you could periodically import data from Zoho Creator into Zoho DB & Reports:

Do give the above feature a try and let us know your feedbacks. This is just the first step in making available the powerful reporting functionality of Zoho DB & Reports to Zoho Creator users. We are continuing our work on this problem to further simplify the process. A much closer GUI level integration of making report creation features of Zoho DB & Reports available within Zoho Creator is in development. We will keep you posted once we are ready with it…

Happy Reporting and Keep tab on further development…

Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

Popularity: 27% [?]

iPhone Application Developers, this post is for you. Don’t be scared away by the length of this post. The results are going to be extremely useful.
If you are an iPhone Application Developer, iTunes Connect provides you daily and weekly sales trends for your application(s) as a CSV file. Sure, you can open that up with Excel or Zoho Sheet and do some basic analysis. But we have a better solution for you in Zoho DB & Reports.

The ‘DB’ part of Zoho DB & Reports might scare you away, but the ‘Reports’ part of it will be REALLY useful when it comes to analyzing your iPhone Application data. What kind of reports can you do with Zoho DB & Reports? Here are few examples (click to enlarge).

If you really want to see this in action, I made this sample database public with some reports created.

Now that I got your attention (hopefully), let me drill down into the details on how you can create similar reports for your iPhone applications. Before we get started though, make sure you download all your daily reports (.CSV files) downloaded from iTunes Connect.

Obviously, the first step is to create a Zoho Account and enter http://db.zoho.com. Once you are in, Create a Database from ‘Import .XLS, .CSV, .HTML…’ option. Give your Database a name like ‘iPhone Reports’ and select the ‘Data Location’ as ‘Local Drive’. Now browse and select one of the downloaded CSV files (you can add others later) and click ‘Next’ and then select the ‘Create’ option in the next screen. This will create a table from the CSV file with 24 columns and multiple rows.

Once the table is created, you are all set to create Reports from this data. Before jumping there, let us make sure you have all the data imported from all the .CSV files you downloaded from iTunes Connect. To Do this, use the ‘Import’ option available on the top and select ‘Import into this table’ option and import all your CSV files using the ‘Local Drive’ as the ‘Data Location’. You’ll end up using this ‘Import’ option daily as and when you have reports available from Apple.

Now that we have the data in Zoho DB, we can now start building different types of reports. Let us start with a simple report that shows ‘Daily Sales’. For this, select the ‘New Report’ option (top left) and choose the ‘Chart View’ option and select the database we just created. Here, you’ll see a simple drag & drop interface where you can drag the columns from the left to the right to generate the report you need. Lets try this together.

Application Daily Sales

Drag the ‘End Date’ column from the left to the ‘X-Axis’ column on the right. Similarly, Drag the ‘Units’ column from the left to ‘Y-Axis’ column on the right. After you dragged the ‘Units’ column, change the ‘Actual (M)’ option to ‘Sum’ for ‘Units’ and ‘Actual (M)’ to ‘Actual(D)’ for the ‘End Date’. The top section will look like this.

Now select the ‘Click Here to Generate Graph’ option and you’ll see the Graph created for you with the daily sales of your application. You just created for the first graph which might look like this.

You can change your graph type with the ‘Other Charts’ option. There are many options available including the 3D Graphs. The nice part about the Graphs in Zoho DB is, these are click-able. Which means, you can click on the graph to view the underlying data.

Now, Save the Graph, give it a name (like ‘Daily Sales Report’) so that you have this graph saves permanently that updates automatically whenever you import the data.

You can also make changes to the Graph. For example, if you want to see the number of units you sold every day displayed on the graph, simply drag the ‘Units’ column from the left to the ‘Text’ section on the right and you’ll see the number of units sold in the graph.

But there is an issue with this graph. As we added the ‘Units’ column to ‘Y-Axis’, it counts every downloaded unit as a sale which may not be the case as your application might have several versions and users download it as free upgrade. It is important to filter this data out to get the correct numbers. To filter out the right information from this graph, let us do this…

Select the ‘Filter’ tab (the vertical tab) and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column. What we are basically doing here is  excluding all the units where ‘Royalty Price’ is 0. Now Refresh the Graph and you should see the correct values for daily sales in your graph.

Now, lets try another graph. This time, let us analyze the daily sales and separate them based on country. For this, it’ll pretty much be the same graph with one simple modification. So let us use the ‘Save As’ option to save this Graph as another graph and call it ‘Daily Sales By Country’.

Daily Sales By Country

Now that we created a new Graph, simply drag the ‘Country Code’ column from the left to the ‘Color’ column on the right and refresh the graph. You’ll see the daily changes color coded by country. Again, you can mouse-over or click on the colors to see the underlying data for this graph.

Let us quickly try some more graphs.

Application Sales By Country:

Create a New Report from ‘Chart View’ option and drag the ‘Country Code’ from ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to ‘Y-Axis’ and voila, you have sales report by Country. But then, don’t forget to filter the upgrades. For this, select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

You can change the graph type to fit your taste. Here is how it looks.

Application Sales By Currency:

Drag the ‘Customer Currency’ to ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to ‘Y-Axis’. You can also drag the ‘Units’ column to the ‘Text’ section to see the number of units displayed. Select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

Application Sales By Currency & Country:

This graph is pretty much similar to the above graph with one additional step. Drag the ‘Country Code’ to the ‘Color’ section. This chart also lets you see which country accepts what currency.

Application Sales By Royalty Price

Drag the ‘Royalty Price (Actual (D)) to ‘X-Axis’, ‘Units (Sum)’ to ‘Y-Axis’ and ‘Country Code’ to color. If the ‘Royalty Price’ is 0, they are upgrades.

Application Total Sales

To see the total sales of the app, simply drag the ‘Vendor Identifier’ to the ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to the ‘Y-Axis’ and ‘Text’ sections. Select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

You’ll see a graph something like this.

Now that you some of these graphs created, what do you need to do to keep them updated? It is simple. Download your reports fromiTunes Connect and Import them to the table. All the charts are automatically updated.

All the graphs I talked above assumes that you have a single app. If you have multiple apps, you can create other interesting graphs. More on that later.

Once you have these graphs created in Zoho DB, you have many other options too. For example, you can right click on any graph and Export the graph as a PDF, Image etc. You can also embed these graphs in your blogs or website like I did above which means, when the data changes in the DB, these images are also updated.

I hope you find Zoho DB useful for this use case. As you play with it you’ll uncover more of its power. Looking forward to see how innovative you’ll get with Zoho DB.

BTW, did I mention that you can do all of this for FREE?

Related Posts:
Olympics Dashboard using Zoho DB

Popularity: 15% [?]

Olympic fever has gripped many of us. This edition could provide a much closer finish at the top of the table with China and USA running head-head. China being the host nation, could have the home advantage to topple US leadership this Olympics. Anyway lets wait and watch….

Some of the Olympics enthusiasts here at Zoho thought about building a Live Olympics 2008 Dashboard for a quick preview of the latest trends. We used Zoho DB & Reports to upload the latest Olympics results periodically and built some insightful reports. We designed a live dashboard using Zoho Wiki collating some of the top reports created. You can access this @ http://olympics2008.wiki.zoho.com

Some of the reports available:

1. Day by Day Medal progress in Olympics 2008 of top performing countries
2. China vs USA head-head comparison
3. Top 7 countries - By Overall Medal count, By Men Event Winners, By Women Event Winners
4. Performance of a Country when being a Olympics Host vs as Non Host
5. many more…

You can also access the entire public Olympic 2008 database done in Zoho DB & Reports.

So just bookmark the Olympics Dashboard, keep track of the progress and enjoy the games…..

Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI service

Popularity: 26% [?]

Zoho DB & Reports offers a wide range of data types (column types) to store your tabular data. So far, the options offered for formatting the data stored in these column types have been limited. We have addressed this in our latest update.

Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.

How to format a column?

1. Select the table or tabular view in which the columns are to be formatted
2. Right click on the column that is to be formatted
3. Set the necessary formatting option in the dialog that pops up
4. Click OK to apply the formatting changes

Immediately you will see the formatting options being applied over the column. Zoho DB & Reports also ensures to carry over this formatting set for a column across all the reports (chart, pivot, summary & tabular) created including this column.

Formatting options supported include Text Alignment, No. of Decimal places (for all numeric data types), Currency Symbol (for currency type), Negative Number Display (for currency type), Date display format and Include thousand separator (for all numeric data types).

Customize Chart Coloring:

In Zoho DB & Reports the colors used in charts have been system generated so far. With the latest update you can now change the colors used in a chart to suit your taste. Follow the below given simple steps to customize the color in a chart:

1. Select the Chart whose colors are to be customized
2. Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
3. Click on any of the category colors listed in the legend (seen on the right side of the chart) to change the same.
4. A color chooser will pop up
5. Choose the color required
6. Click Apply to apply the color Or Click on Use Default if you would like to revert to system generated colors.

Auto-recognizing currency data during Import:

Now Zoho DB & Reports has included the intelligence to auto-identify a data column as currency when you import it into Zoho DB & Reports. You do not have to manually set the data type of those columns as currency, which had been the case so far. The data could be in any of the accepted currency formats (with currency symbol or abbreviation eg., $, USD etc.,) of any country. Auto-recognition would be applied when you import data into Zoho DB & Reports from any of CSV or .XLS or HTML files

Hope you find the above features useful. As always do give it a try and let us know your comments….

With regards,
Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI Service

Popularity: 16% [?]

We get this question quite often -

Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?

We have various options depending on each Zoho service.

Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.

Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents

Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.

Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)

Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button

Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.

Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup

Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.

Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file

Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer’s info as VCard (vcf).

Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.

We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Printing the reports created in Zoho DB & Reports has been one of the most requested features by our users. And this is now available. You can export any of your reports created (be it chart, pivots, table … ) into a printer friendly PDF file for printing. We offer a good set of options to customize your print outs too. Settings include Page Size, Headers, Footers, etc.

How to Take a Print?

1. Select the report to be printed from within Zoho DB & Reports
2. Select the “Export” -> “Export as PDF” menu
3. You will see a PDF Export settings dialog as below
4. Provide the necessary settings like file name, page size, margins, footer and header
5. Click OK to generate the PDF
6. Save the PDF file generated into your local folder or Open it from within your browser
7. You can print the PDF generated anytime

Hope you find this useful. Take a Print out and let us know how you like it.

Popularity: 17% [?]