Data and the Web

Yikes. It's been a while. We've been pulled off on myriad other important projects, but happy to announce a new upgrade to Kirix Strata. Better late than never, right… right?

In addition to lots and lots of under-the-hood stuff fixed, stabilized and optimized, we've got some nice features people have been asking for. Here's a list of the highlights:

• XLSX and ACCDB support. It's been a long time coming, but you can now import directly from the newer file formats from Excel and Access instead of using CSV or XLS/MDB workarounds.
• Report formatting. Reports now support cell borders/lines as well as vertical alignment. Yay!

In a bit of sad news, with this upgrade we say goodbye to the Linux version of Kirix Strata. Historically, there hasn't been enough commercial traction for the version and, unfortunately, supporting it further is cost prohibitive.

In addition to the things above, we've made many improvements to various bits and bobs throughout the package, which should lead to better overall performance. Download the Windows 32-bit version here.

Enjoy!

P.S. Mea Culpa. We've experienced some unrelenting spam issues on the blog comments and forum as of late and we're trying to clean that all up; sorry 'bout that and thanks for your patience.

We're pleased to announce that Kirix Strata™ is now officially out of beta! A lot of hard work and late nights of coding have been put into this li'l tool and we hope it makes people's lives a little bit easier when it comes to data analysis.

Thanks to everyone who has been involved in the beta process — we'll get those free licenses rolled out to you within the week.

Also, you'll notice a big ol' website redesign too. We want to give a special shout out to Jeff, Benni, Peter and David for the bang up job they did with the design and implementation of the website. And, here's our new overview video, check it out:

(And here's an embeddable YouTube version…)

Now that Strata is out, we're looking forward to adding a lot more content to the site, in terms of more data-centric blog posts, product applications, tips & tricks as well as some open-source projects that we've been working on in the background. Oh yes, we also have a load of extensions that we are planning to release too. So much to do, so little time.

Thanks again to everyone. Please download the full version of Strata and try it out for 30 days free. If you have any questions, feel free to post a message to the forums or shoot us an email.

Well, it took a lot more blood, sweat and tears than we expected, but we're really excited to announce our first public beta release of Kirix Strata™, the data browser.

And what, pray tell, is a “data browser”?

Well, Strata is a specialty browser that lets you access and manipulate data from pretty much anywhere on the web. For instance, Strata will let you grab HTML tables or RSS Feeds or even open up CSV files directly from a URL (wow, that's a lot of acronyms).

Then when you've got the data in a table, you can do all sorts of ad hoc analysis. You can create calculations or sort and filter or create queries and reports — similar to the kinds of things you might do with a desktop database or a spreadsheet. In addition to web data, you can still work with data from your desktop or in a database system like Oracle or MySQL Enterprise.

And for those more technically-inclined, Strata also includes an implementation of ECMAScript — so anyone familiar with Javascript should feel right at home. The nice thing about the scripting is that it also includes bindings for SQL and HTTP — which can make for a lot of fun when connecting to Web APIs, creating “desktop mashups” or building extensions. And to boot, it runs on both Windows and Linux (at this moment, only Ubuntu is supported officially).

We also just want to give a quick shout out to the excellent folks at wxWidgets (we use their GUI library) and Mozilla (Strata incorporates the Gecko engine) — without which, Strata would only be a mere twinkle in our eye.

So, without further ado, check out the Kirix Strata introduction video:

(And here's an embeddable YouTube version…)

and then

Download and try out the data browser for yourself

We hope you enjoy it!