Roadmap

The overall product roadmap for both xSkrape and SQL-Hero is guided by, roughly in order of importance:

  1. User Feedback - We'd prefer to work on requests that are coming from the user community first and foremost.
  2. Quality - We'd prefer to work on even lower-priority bugs over features where it makes sense, leading to high quality software that does what you expect.
  3. Relevant Features and Documentation - This is driven by our own perceptions of what the market is lacking, not where the crowd is going. We still prefer to validate this using user feedback, along with our own experiences from the consulting world. We're doing more and more to explain what may be perceived as complex topics using examples and easy-to-read reference documentation.
  4. Incremental Improvement - These might be called "nice-to-have's" but we certainly take them seriously, so fire away! (Sometimes the small things make all the difference!)

Relevant Features: Today's Vision

We do have some priorities that are guiding on-going development, influenced by the inputs described above. Our feedback page even lets you see what we're currently working on! This can help you understand what future product versions may look like and therefore what you're buying into, longer-term.

xSkrape

  • Broaden sources supported - A large part of our power is in having a common API for many types of data source. More source types will be transparent to the API user. (Eg. OData, JSON/XML as tabular.)
  • More options to transform sources - As one example, JSON as a source is in a hierarchical format. We therefore don't offer a "tabular" output (eg. WebGetTable) for JSON - but we could by flattening it and offering some intuitive options like DISTINCT, MIN, MAX, etc.
  • More configuration options - We currently support settings in a "connection string-like" format, which lets us add more options easily. We've got ideas related to persistent caching, for example (letting you take your Excel workbooks off-line and still have your data available).
  • More query options - Our query language is flexible and can be extended with new keywords. Expect to see more solutions for real-world use cases.
  • Continue improving Page Explorer - In a perfect world, Page Explorer would be a perfect Artificial Intelligence assistant. We'll be working on getting it there in future releases.
  • Orthogonal design - This means having an API that looks as close as possible between all flavors of xSkrape. So for example, we'd like to get xSkrape for SSIS to share many of the newer things we've done with xSkrape for Excel (and vice versa) - such as the query language to isolate scalar values.
  • Cloud-based options - We may choose to offer more services such as "change tracking / notifications" and cloud-caching in up-coming releases.

SQL-Hero

  • Continued user observation improvements - Most features in SQL-Hero came from observing pain-points that appeared again and again. We'll be continuing to address these with innovative approaches.
  • Templates, templates, templates - A lot in SQL-Hero revolves around templates. We expect to add more to cover more use cases in up-coming releases. We're also considering developing a web-based platform to share your templates among the community.
  • Support for more RDBMS - There's no reason we can't support databases other than SQL Server: we're looking at getting our provider model solid with SQL Server, and we're largely "there."