Item: Quickbase
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's being used in the R&D department to catalog a searchable database of commercial DNA samples, and associate their genotypes with them. We needed this database to be searchable by any field; for each sample to have multiple mutations, and for each mutation to be associated with multiple samples. We also needed each sample to be locatable within a box, so that we could find them when they were being used for experiments.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Searching for any attribute - necessary when an object has multiple important attributes that you need to search by or cross reference
Linking to outside databases - hard to do in any other program without merging the databases

Cons

It very difficult to associate both multiple attributes to one object and multiple objects to one attribute at the same time in the same database.
I'd also like to see some sort of quick tutorial, most of the things that I figure out I did so just clicking around.

Likelihood to Recommend

Complex databases, with multiple associations between databases I think are much better suited to Quickbase. I think the more complex the better suited Quickbase is for the application. Simple tables, where there is only one association are just easier to use Excel for, as it is easier to import/export data, and perform extra functionality on the data, like calculations or searches, things like that.

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Using Quickbase to Establish a Lab Sample Tracking System