Database Designs consultants have designed, built, adapted, customized and re-engineered hundreds of database systems over the eighteen years of our existence. We provide database development and integration at all levels of complexity. Our seasoned consultants have the experience to lead a design and discovery process that will produce a lean, robust architecture to support mission-driven software development on any scale.

Needs Assessment, Design and Planning

We work best when our clients engage us to do a strategic evaluation of their current software systems, looking at how they work — or don't work — in expediting their week-to-week workflow. We also look at larger, long-term organizational objectives. We aim for solutions that give our clients "room to grow." Our research explores all the options—including, but not restricted to—ones we can provide.

Buy-versus-Build

We think of ourselves first as custom developers in the buy-versus-build continuum. But, the truth is that these days there is hardly any assignment we take on today where we start from scratch. We are either drawing on our own extensive library of software tools, bringing into play one or more preferred open source or commercial tools, or working within our clients’ software environment.

Microsoft Development

For the web and database work we do, our capabilities span a range of software development environments. We have a strong appreciation for the Microsoft developer environment, from sophisticated Access and Office systems to .Net web environments. We have been working with these tools since Access 2.0 and Visual Basic 3. We take part in the Open Source .Net Nuke developer community for Microsoft web software.

New for 2007, we have repackaged the best of our own desktop Access-based software tools into a standard nonprofit contact relationship manager. Read more about this software.

Open Source Development

We strongly believe in Open Source development. We have grown to take on sophisticated Linux-Apache software projects, using MySQL, PostGres, Perl and PHP. We have used and strongly supported the early Content Management and database development system, XINA, and have used a variety of other tools.

Database Designs associate Sarah Bennett has developed a suite of a la carte tools for managing events, news, and online registration.

Among the complete website development environments, we have committed to Drupal. Today, Drupal has the best overall combination of design flexibility (though not necessarily ease), rich set of Web 2.0 and other optional modules, and flexible custom programming with PHP. We have relaunched this site using it.

Multivalue (Pick) Development

We continue to support organizations using the uniquely powerful and stable Multivalue database environment. We are authorized by Raining Data and are long time partners with Vantage Point Software for large scale, object oriented web and database develpment, on both Linux and Microsoft servers.