Many of you, but perhaps not all, know that I spend my work time on a project called Dabble DB, a web-based database system. It launched last June, and we’ve found some moderate success — our customers are often surprisingly effusive in their praise — and I like to think we’ve made it easier for non-technical people to create a database and get more out of their data.

Well, last Thursday we made it a whole lot easier to get something out of Dabble: we launched Dabble DB Commons, a totally free version of the product. Free in more than one sense of the word: it’s free to use, but with that privilege we ask that you make your data free too, under a Creative Commons license. (You still get attribution rights and you can specify whether you want your data to be open to commercial use.)

We’re pretty excited about the possibilities. There are other free database tools, of course, but we don’t think any of them offer such an easy user experience while still offering such deep exploration and reporting possibilities. We recently added charts and maps to Dabble so now you can throw some data in and visualize your data in only a few clicks.

Once we start to get a few people using Dabble DB Commons then we’ll start indexing everything and highlighting the most interesting and novel applications on our site.

Not everyone needs a database, of course, but there’s an awful lot of data out there sitting in sad little Excel spreadsheets or in MySQL databases needing database programmers that are expensive and in short supply. Well now you don’t need to suffer in your spreadsheet or with obscure SQL syntax. If you have some data that you don’t mind sharing, come on over and try Dabble DB Commons.