Web-enabling databases

A topic tangential to ZOOMS is the Web-Enabling of Databases.

The relational database world is dominated by text… getting into the database and digging the information out was/still is a major challenge.

In fact, this year (2009), there are still people logging into a system to copy-paste the data into Excel spreadsheets for further processing. Afterall, if the goal was to analyze the data and Excel was all you knew, this method makes a lot of sense.

So having a lightweight application to get data to the web was in order, and we invented the Zymergi SQL Tool for the job.

For a quick show of its capabilities, Zymergi presents a free FDA resource where we will be web-enabling databases published by the Food and Drug Administration under the Freedom of Information Act. Each resource (Drugs@FDA, Title 21 CFRs, Warning Letters… and more to come) were built in less than a week. Full-text search will be available as soon as the Googlebot crawls the website (I’m thinking by the end of July).

So come test-drive this resource and let us know how we can improve.