[HN Gopher] The magic of small databases
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The magic of small databases
Author : topcat31
Score : 89 points
Date : 2023-01-28 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tomcritchlow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomcritchlow.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| A search for "filemaker" reveals that Claris is still in
| business; I'd hope they'd have _something_ that might address
| this need?
| zokier wrote:
| Personally I find the whole dBase etc non-SQL kinda-graphical
| database systems interesting historical software branch that
| feels mostly died out these days. Access probably did quite a lot
| of damage here, killing out competitors before mostly succumbing
| itself.
| gavinmckenzie wrote:
| Takes me back to the days of dBase, Clipper, and my favourite
| FoxPro which was acquired by Microsoft and continued to exist
| in the 90s. Access definitely destroyed the market for these
| other products by combining aspects of Visual Basic and
| database tech.
| pstuart wrote:
| FoxPro on the Mac was wonderful. I learned SQL wrangling with
| analytics on it -- there weren't all the options we have
| today.
| gcanyon wrote:
| FileMaker is still a thing. I don't know their internal
| financials, but they've steadily improved the product over the
| years. https://www.claris.com
|
| Or if you want to go super-niche, Panorama is still around, and
| (they say) the longest-running Mac software developer apart
| from Microsoft. https://www.provue.com
|
| Either one makes it easy to build a database+interface.
| digitalsankhara wrote:
| I had a distant memory about this Mac based
| spreadsheet/database thing but could not remember its name
| (Panorama). Couldn't surface it in searches either. Thought
| about it the other week and here we are!
|
| Odd pricing though = pay in advance credits. Ummm, not
| something I'd like to use for work when I'm in the middle of
| an important analysis with a deadline and I (inevitably) run
| out of credits and have to start faffing about with in-app
| purchases. Maybe its not that bad and I'm being unfair.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| There are categories of "Nocode" online services that could work,
| more or less, as small databases. Some are already cited in the
| article:
|
| - DBs platforms (Best for more advanced DB) : Airtable,
| getgrist.com
|
| - wikis+DB platforms (Best for building a site around the DB) :
| notion.so, coda.io
|
| - Airtable/GSheet publishing (Best for simple/custom UI) :
| glideapps.com, siteoly.com
|
| - Bookmarks/Collections (Best for links/References) : Zotero
| (online groups), are.na
|
| - List sharing (Best for open collaboration?) : listium.com,
| (ranker.com ?)
|
| - BI platforms (Best for advanced filters/charts) :
| polymersearch.com, Google Data Studio
|
| - Data Set Hosting (Best for downloading?) : data.world,
| kaggle.com
|
| All these allow publishing, and some collaboration
| nerdponx wrote:
| What about Datasette and/or Dolt.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| My list included nocode services only.
| btown wrote:
| Buried in here is a fascinating musing on "Market-making Small
| Databases" - "Imagine a Substack for databases - an easy tool for
| creating, maintaining and publishing databases with the ability
| to restrict parts or all of it behind a pay wall. Pair it with
| the ability to send email updates to your audience about changes
| and additions..." It's worth a read in full in the original
| article.
|
| One of my favorite small databases is https://hiregoats.com/ -
| it's a simple site showing goat herds for rent (for clearing
| brush in a sustainable way, etc.), monetized with at $35 listing
| fee and nothing else. There's no e-commerce, no attempt to insert
| the site into the transaction or funds flow, no bells and
| whistles. Certainly this doesn't scale to other niches where
| suppliers are less incentivized to pay a listing fee, but I'd
| love to see this kind of thing be more common, and incentivize
| people to curate.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I was quite amused when I went to the goats page to see they
| are expanding into other markets. They now have a sister site
| of https://hiresheep.com/
| btown wrote:
| Much less inventory, though! But it's cool that they're
| starting somewhere - they have no need to feel sheepish just
| because their other site is so much more goated.
| xnx wrote:
| "Publishing documents to the web is a well-served use case but
| publishing small indexes, databases and collections to the web is
| still an incredibly frustrating and under-served use case. Here I
| outline why I think it matters and a variety of approaches to
| solving it."
|
| Amen. I'm surprised the post doesn't mention sqlite3 WASM/JS
| (https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/about.md). That, paired with
| an easy-to-use faceting library, would go a long way.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| Reminds of Amazon EBS and a white paper describing the philosophy
| of deploying millions of tiny databases:
|
| https://assets.amazon.science/c4/11/de2606884b63bf4d95190a3c...
| overgard wrote:
| People would love this for sports. There's so much interesting
| data locked up in proprietary databases
| dmje wrote:
| I run a little agency in the UK who works with museums to help
| them with digital. A large part of this is getting collections
| online.
|
| Some years ago we commissioned a developer to make
| CultureObject[0], a free and open source WordPress plugin to make
| it easier to ingest collections data for display on the web. At
| the heart it's a glorified data importer, and many people just
| use the CSV mode to sync and import collections data.
|
| It requires some dev effort - we've built an add-on which makes
| this easier but there's no denying that search, faceting and
| display needs knowledge of wordpress development.
|
| Three years ago we then launched The Museum Platform[1] which is
| a more SaaS based model - we take away the need for dev skills
| and ask clients to just send us a CSV and any related media and
| we do the hard work. It's WordPress again but a modified version
| where we also facilitate storytelling and narrative around the
| ingested collections.
|
| The interesting thing about this journey is that the requirement
| to "get a collection online" is apparently and theoretically
| easy. But the reality is it gets hard quite quickly as the need
| for search / filtering appears, and it gets harder still as scale
| comes into it. 1000 records is fine. 100,000 gets quite a bit
| harder.
|
| There are also many subtleties - particularly with museum
| collections. "Location" of a record could be where it was
| collected, or where it is now, or where it's on display.
| Relational stuff is hard, as are taxonomies and authority terms.
| It's hard to generalise and it's hard to scale.
|
| [0] https://cultureobject.co.uk/ [1]
| https://themuseumplatform.com/
| jerryu wrote:
| Having a small database is especially useful when collaborating
| on data strategy. I have seen some database diagrams with 1000s
| of tables and it is hard to make sense of it using ERD tools.
|
| Even with advanced views offered by tools like ERDLab.io it is a
| pain in the ass to collaborate on large schemas at various stages
| of development.
| dgudkov wrote:
| Small databases aren't popular because Excel spreadsheets already
| occupy that niche. A small database doesn't have to be
| normalized. Because it's small, it can be denormalized into a
| flat table that can be conveniently handled in Excel.
| simongray wrote:
| This post is an exercise in describing the motivation and
| features of the Semantic Web seemingly without realising the tech
| stack already exists.
| simonw wrote:
| I honestly think that reflects more poorly on the semantic web
| tech stack than it does on the author of that piece.
|
| I spend almost all of my time thinking about this class of
| problems and hanging out with other people who do, and sadly
| it's vanishingly rare to run into anyone outside of academia
| who's trying to use the classic semantic web stack (RDF an
| suchlike) to build this kind of thing.
| [deleted]
| cavisne wrote:
| I feel like this is getting really close. GPT is create at
| writing sql queries from text and turning a blob of semi
| structured data into an sql schema.
|
| We just need to somehow tie it together so anyone can explain
| their use case, and show an example of the data in plain english,
| then lock in a schema and feed everything in.
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