Dabble DB Blog

An important announcement

Natasha John — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:39:24 -0700

Dear Dabblers,

We would like to notify you that we will be shutting down the
Dabble DB service on May 18, 2011. After exploring other options
including finding another home for Dabble DB or continuing to
try to support it ourselves, we've come to this difficult
decision. We deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause you.

Your data will remain available for export by you through
May 18, 2011. After May 18, your data will become unavailable,
so it is important to complete your data export no later than
May 18. After May 18, we will begin the process of purging all
user data stored on our hardware. To assist you with your data
export, we have prepared data export instructions, which you
can find at http://dabbledb.com/help/index/backup.

If you are a month-to-month Dabble DB service customer, we will
have stopped billing your credit card as of the date of this
letter, March 17, 2011. If you are an annual or semi-annual
pre-paid customer, we will credit the card we have on file for
you with a prorated refund from March 17, 2011 to the end of
your pre-paid billing term. If you are a cheque-paying customer,
we will be issuing you a pro-rated refund by cheque and mailing
it out to the invoicing address we have on file.

If you have any questions related to exporting your data or the
closure of your account, please email support@dabbledb.com and
we will do our best to assist.

Thank you for having been a Dabble DB customer.

Sincerely,
/s/
The Dabble DB Team

Server issues

Natasha John — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:05:41 -0800

Update Nov 23

We have overhauled the server and your databases should be in much better shape now. We apologize for the huge inconvenience this has caused many of you, and thank you for bearing with us through this epic frustration. Attachments will be inaccessible for another day. Custom domains will not work right now, so please email us and we can shut the custom domain off so that you can login at your www.accountname.dabbledb.com address. We are also aware of the PDF printing problem and are working on getting that back up. We, too, would like to see normal programming resume (completely), very soonUpdate Nov 22

We've been having problems all week and we're currently continuing to work with our hosting provider to replace the server that's been causing so much agony. Until then, we regret to say that your database may be up and down. Please keep checking it (you may need to restart your browser for the db to load properly), and you may wish to follow our updates on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/dabbledb). Due to the volume of email we're receiving, it may take us some time to respond to each one. When things are back up and running as per usual, we will certainly let you know immediately.

We have been working over the weekend with our server provider to figure out what's going on with the mischevious server and in the meantime we have moved things to a different server and you should be able to access your database. If you are unable to, please send us your account name to support@dabbledb.com. You may also have trouble accessing your attachments, but this will be resolved when the main server is brought back to normal.

Update Nov 19:

10:40am Pacific time, If you can access your database, you ought to be able to log into it now, and we hope you won't have any further password problems (though you may need to reset the password).

If your database is or goes down completely and you get a "System busy" or "Processing a slow request" message, please know that we're fixing whatever server has just broken and we hope to have it back up shortly.

You may also notice periodic problems with accessing attachments or generating backups -- the server which performs those two functions is very unreliable today. In any case, we will update everyone as soon as we hear news that all our servers have finally been fixed. Until then, your database will likely be up and down.

Many have expressed concern and have asked if this is a result of the acquisition and we can tell you that the troubles we have had this week have nothing to do with that. Unfortunately, it's not something we could have foreseen happening and is an issue that we are resolving with our server host provider. We can assure you that all hands are on deck, whether it's trying to fix the problem, communicate with our provider, or just keeping everyone informed with the current status of service. We apologize for the very frustrating inconvenience this has caused you this week and we hope that we can resolve this very soon.

As of 8:55am Pacific time, things are back up.

Things were up last night and have come down again this morning. We know that this is beyond frustrating for everyone and it certainly hasn't been our best week. We can assure you that all hands are on deck to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Due to the volume of emails we are receiving, it may take us a little while to respond to you. In the meantime, please check our Twitter account as we will be making regular updates there http://www.twitter.com/dabbledb

Update Nov 17:

Hi All,

We apologize for the downtime you have all experienced this week. We have a server that is being especially mischevious and we're working on it with our server provider. If you are experiencing any problems, please email support@dabbledb.com and let us know your database name and we can look into it for you.

There are a large number of emails that we're responding to, so it may be a good idea to check on your database now and then, as it may take us a little while to get through each one when things are back up again.

A big thank you to everyone for you patience this week.

Update: Things are back up and running. You should all be set now.

If you have been trying to access your database this morning, you may have noticed you're hitting a "System Busy" error. One of our servers is down and we're looking into it. As soon as there's an update, we will let you know. We're very sorry for any inconvinience this is causing and hope to get things back up as soon as possible.

Cheers,

The Dabble DB Team

Announcement

Andrew Catton — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:08:35 -0700

You may have noticed that we’ve been a bit quiet lately. It’s not that we’ve been on vacation; rather we can finally announce today that our company, Smallthought Systems, has been acquired. We’re joining forces with our friends at Twitter.

To our users:

Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.

There will be further changes to Dabble's ongoing operations, and when those happen, we want to do right by you. We will provide you with 60 days advance notice of any major change. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that, at any time, you can export all of your data, including attachments, in a structured format suitable for import into other systems.

Why we're excited:

Company:

Twitter the company feels like a bigger version of Smallthought: fun-loving, user-focused, and lots of smarts everywhere you look. We know we'll fit in great there and help them become even better.

Product:

Twitter is simple, elegant, useful and has its own personality — just like Dabble DB and Trendly. It's a product we all love using every day.

Impact:

Like Dabble, Twitter has very passionate users, but the scale is completely different. We're very excited about increasing the number of lives we touch by orders of magnitude.

Location:

Avi, Ben, Luke and I will be moving down to San Francisco this fall to work in Twitter's great downtown offices. We'll certainly miss everyone we're leaving behind, but at the same time we're excited about a new adventure. One great consequence of this is that the four of us will finally all live and work out of the same city — that has never happened before!

- Andrew

Server problem

Avi — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:41:46 -0800

One of our servers is currently down. We're working to restore it as soon as possible. We apologize for the disruption.

Update at 1:35 PM EST: the server is now back up and running.

PDF print server maintenance

Avi — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:53:15 -0800

Due to scheduled maintenance, our PDF print server will be unavailable on Saturday, February 13, 2010 from approximately 2pm to 3pm EST (7pm to 8pm GMT). That means it will not be possible to create PDFs from Dabble DB during this time. All other service should be unaffected. We apologize for the inconvenience.