Yesterday I couldn't create a histogram in Zoho Sheet, the can't-possibly-lose Ajax spreadsheet from fail factory Zoho. It couldn't import 10,000 rows of floating point numbers. I understand, though. Parsing CSV data is really hard.

Of the fourteen "business applications" that Zoho has reimplemented in Ajax, one of them is a database-like program. Now, I am sure that some of your out there have had the unfortunate opportunity to work with Microsoft Access. Believe me when I tell you that if Access made you sigh from time to time, Zoho DB will make you want to paint the walls with your brains.

Breaking New Grounds In Error Messages

Software as a Service is supposed to be the next revolution. Whether or not that is true, I am not sure. There is a lot that needs to happen before it can be practical. However, what I can tell you definitively is that the SaaS version of Che Guevara does not work at Zoho.

Zoho DB successfully imported 10,000 rows of floating point data. It did warn me that I couldn't import more than 25,000 rows, though. Great. A database that can't take more than 25,000 rows. Now that's quality.

I decided yesterday that I'm not going to rest until I get my fucking histogram. It's no longer just an experiment, it's a mission. I hit the "graph" button in Zoho's view, and got a pie chart of my data, evenly distributed in some buckets. Awesome! But I want a bar graph. I clicked the bar graph button, and I got my first experience with the most prevalent feature of Zoho's whole office suite: the unexplained failure message:

This is a popular little guy, and we'll get back to him in a bit. By the way, I never got my histogram.

The JavaScript File For This Thing is 21,587 Lines Long

And it loves to eat CPU. I noticed a pretty good fail in the tabular view, too. Check this out:

Why can't I continue to scroll to the bottom of my data with the scroll bar? Something having to do with HTML? It doesn't matter. For breaking a UI convention like this, you have no excuse.

Ah, right. Technicals. Zoho DB has a feature that would be cool if it weren't such a catastrophic failure. Given one of your tables, you can create a new table out of it using SQL syntax. Now, I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out if parsing & executing ANSI SQL is done in JavaScript. I couldn't tell, because I couldn't get the fucking thing to work. Remember our little friend the unexplained failure message? Yeah, he was keeping me company while I tried out this feature.

I Will Post This Until You Like It

Software as a service is a good theory, but Zoho reminds me of the Golden Rule that I grew up with: you can't depend on anyone but yourself. Your typical enterprise has IT dweebs on staff to help users when Access is having problems. They know how to reinstall Office, fix up missing dependencies, and generally deal with Access's bullshit.

With Zoho DB, however, IT gets a lot more fun. It's awesome because you're never quite sure what critical feature is going to give you the unexplained failure message. It could be something you've used reliably for months, and one day, it just doesn't work. Of course, as an IT dude, you can't debug this, because asking the user "OK what did you change recently?" isn't going to work. You can't call up Zoho and ask what the fuck is going on over there because they're wrapped up in flamewars in Uncov's comments. Sounds to me like you're fucked, son.