COVID Special Sale - DataPower 3 and Home

Being driven stir-crazy by the lockdown? Why not learn a new RISC OS program? How about at 50-60% off? It’s the COVID Special !Store sale!

Database programs are sometimes seen as complex, but DataPower’s friendly, visual “DTP-like” approach makes creating and using databases easy. It’s the ideal time to learn how to store and work with data, and your databases can be read on Windows too, via the Windows DataPower software included.

Start with DataPower Home, now just 19.99ukp for one of RISC OS’ top-tier applications. It provides a comprehensive system for storing info – names and addresses, recipes, photo indexes, even invoices – you name it. DataPower Home is surprisingly powerful, thanks to a range of powerful tools and even scripting capabilities if you have a little time to explore. It includes charting/graphing too, for displaying your data, and easy DTP-style reports.

Or, if you’re up for something more extensive, DataPower 3 (now just 39.99 – a huge saving) allows databases with multiple tables of cross-referenced information. This is what’s called a “relational” database. DataPower 3 also allows industry standard SQL queries to be composed, and offers simple client/server database sharing too! At this price (the lowest it has ever been), it’s amazing value.

The DataPower family is often cited amonst RISC OS’ elite application – Artworks, Ovation Pro, Sibelius, PhotoDesk and so on. Originally developed by Neil Raines who worked with Acorn on various projects (including the drag’n’drop protocol which has just been adopted more extensively in RO5!) It’s a package that is both simple to use, and deeply powerful, implementing the best of RISC OS useablility.

Nice one…! As an existing owner of DataPower for the RISC PC, you’ve just made me an offer I couldn’t refuse! ;-)

Great offer Andrew!

I’m interested in DataPower 3 thx, and this post reminds me I always wanted to ask you: Is there a way to make “external” code (written in C possibly) to use DataPower DBs?

Thanks,

Yes, you can either use DP as a user interface (buttons etc) and call scripts with custom functions to go beyond what DP does natively.

Or, I think more in line with what you’re wanting to do, you can create/call scripts from your own applications to drive the database and run queries, edit/add records etc.

Additionally, just now, I’ve re-found the DataPower-1-engine-as-a-C-library version that powers Fireworkz Pro. Although this is flat-file, it can reference external tables via CSV/TSV “lookup” function, so is a little more powerful than a vanilla flat-file database.

Indeed, the classic DP 1 demo was to look up products/prices in a lookup CSV for inclusion in a invoice database. Essentially each line in the invoice drew its possible values/prices from the CSV, and allowed you to add these to your invoice (with a quantity) to build a result. The final invoices were the “records” of the flat file database, but were effectively built relationally via the lookup function.

All of this is, AFAIK, present in the C-library version that powers Fireworkz Pro (indeed, I saw reference to “lookup” in Stuart’s more recent “addendum” documentation for FZ Pro).

I’m not sure quite on what basis to make this available, but it’s sat here, with an example, all ready to go. It’s in standard Acorn C (ie. only dependencies are Stubs(g) + RISC_OSLib ) so can be built/linked with the DDE. There’s also a little example app too.

Is this something that would be of interest to people?

Hi Andrew,
thanks a lot for your reply. The option sounds interesting to me (at least to try out, can purchase the component obviously).

I’m not sure quite on what basis to make this available, but it’s sat here, with an example, all ready to go. It’s in standard Acorn C (ie. only dependencies are Stubs(g) + RISC_OSLib ) so can be built/linked with the DDE. There’s also a little example app too.

From NDA to Developer License? Create a yearly Developer subscription? Not necessarily pushing for this but: OSS? I mean such form of library is mostly going to be used to build (Business?) products so probably a subscription is best to pay for upgrades/fixes and avoid the pain of licensing, but licensing may be good too I don’t know.

Is this something that would be of interest to people?

Tools to help reducing development time are something that nowadays is generally welcome a bit everywhere, given that (mostly due to Agile philosophy et similar) time to model a piece of software and/or to setup an MVP/PoC have shrunk a lot compared to the 80s/90s.

It is true that Business apps have heavily moved over Web interface, but RISC OS doesn’t yet have a browser capable of effectively cover such type of usage, so OS UI based business apps especially for RPi are still a viable option given that an Rpi is cost competitive and offer performances that allow to build business software on it (especially from the RPi 4 but also on the 3 things can work sufficiently fine).

The alternative right now, as far as I know, is only use SQLite lib or try the ODBC stuff ported by the RSSC (which I am not sure works everywhere yet, but I could be wrong).

just my 0.5p

I would be interested if it provided some sort of Open Database Connectivity for !DataPower, so that it could be utilised from C,C++ or Python (ODBC)…