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Decorating data

Chris Gemignani

An early Christmas present has arrived from the DabbleDB team for the 100 million or so of us that have to work with data on a day to day basis.

They’ve created a do-what-I-mean web tool that lets you show how you want data to be restructured and bang! it’s done. Check out the video.

Cleanup data in action

It’s a great idea and a elegant, easy to use interface. There are so many directions I’d love to see them take this tool.

Cleanupdata is a great name, but they’re really giving you better ways to restructure data. This tool won’t help you find and fix errors and anomalies in data. At least not yet.

I also hope they extend cleanupdata to let people automate these data restructuring operations. If only you could apply a cleanup created in cleanupdata.com to 1,000 Excel spreadsheets or to a database table.

If you like this, it’s worth checking out DabbleDB. They have rethought the database with a database/spreadsheet/web forms/visualizer platypus of a tool. It lets your data be pliable in ways that databases don’t allow, while retaining structure that spreadsheets don’t recognize.

Added: Avi Bryant, one of the authors of the cleanupdata.com service notes that the example in the screencast is motivated by this post on cleaning data in Excel. Compare and contrast. I know most people would prefer to avoid ="("&MID(H2,1,3)&") "&MID(H2,4,3)&"-"&MID(H2,7,4) in order to format a phone number.

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  • Avi Bryant

    Yes, allowing this to be automated is definitely in our future plans. We just wanted to get something out quickly for people to start playing with so we could see how well it worked in the wild first.

    Minor nitpick: I’m not the sole author of this service, everyone on the Dabble DB team worked on it to some degree.

  • Tom

    Looks great, but I’m not sure about the prospect of sharing all of my data. Both from the perspective of sharing it with Dabble as a data processor, but also the need to transmit it over the internet.. less good!

  • Bjoern

    I agree with Tom. I’d love this to run locally, but transmitting the data to dabble db and then have it mailed back to me. I don’t know about US regulations but in Europe I would get seriously smacked on the head for that, especially for data like social security numbers, names and contact data that was shown in the example video.

  • Chris Gemignani

    Thanks for the clarification, Avi. I’ve updated the text. Congrats to the DabbleDB team. We love it.

  • Michel Guillet

    Hi Chris,

    I’ve been using birst, a comparable product, with some success.

  • Mike Chelen

    Is the free version always available or only for a 30 day trial? Also, it would be nice if more that 15000 rows were supported, overall looks like a pretty cool site and services :)

  • Ted

    Sorry, I much prefer a spreadsheet and formulas. They give you complete control (the code in this product is going to make assumptions that are wrong at times), they are very repeatable (i.e. if I do the same thing every day, I shouldn’t need to repeat my actions in a browser and run batch jobs), and you can look back at a later point in time and see what you (or soemone else) did very easily. Maybe MID is complicated, but I don’t think so.

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