dBASE Assumes New Identity, Enters BI Market

The company that owns the rights to the dBASE database program has repositioned itself as a business intelligence vendor and today launched software that it hopes to use to forge new inroads into the BI market.

dBASE Inc., Vestal, N.Y., took the name dataBased Intelligence (dBI) in August following the promotion of Larry Foster as its new CEO. Foster, a software veteran, was a member of the founding team at Ingram Micro. dBASE Inc. acquired the dBASE technology from Borland in 1999.

On Tuesday dBI launched dQuery, a business intelligence tool that the company said is capable of connecting to practically any type of database and compiling information in easy-to-use formats for non-IT users. The software is designed to take advantage of the near-ubiquity of dBASE formats in databases.

The technology called dBASE was one of the first database programs for personal computers, and its file formats became de facto standards. In particular, its .dbf format is widely supported by major databases, including IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Oracle products and Sybase databases, among others. dBI is leveraging that support in the new dQuery software, which can connect to databases without forcing IT departments to write new code.

dQuery is designed to let business users query information from the desktop, from a network or over the Web. The application lets users drag and drop tables from databases into a work area, from which information can then be analyzed, filtered and reported. Data can be imported into Microsoft Excel in addition to dQuery's own reporting formats. A permission-based element of the technology lets managers control which data individual staff members can access.

dBI is selling dQuery for $795 at its product Web site. The company also is making a 30-day evaluation copy of the software available.