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Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

steinhq.com

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Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#61

Post by shivensinha4 »

mirimir wrote: post #59
pault wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a definition of webpage, but you don't explain why webpages aren't a subset of apps. I saw your comment pre-edit, which said that an app has to be downloaded to a user's device to run, but that also doesn't exclude webpages since an HTML document and its scripts also have to be downloaded to a device to run. Is it something that has to be pre-compiled? Is an html and javascript page embedded in a binary an app…

App is short for application. Web pages with scripting existed for years before anyone called anything an app. Maybe it's just semantics. But it comes off, to me, as pretentious.

Sorry for coming off as pretentious, but that's just the default message that comes with create-react-app. And I conveniently disregarded the idea of making a change!

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#62

Post by shivensinha4 »

badestrand wrote: post #29

Looks neat! Questions: - Do updates show immediately (for both directions)? - What are the limits of read/write queries? - What are the limits of rows? - Can I use formulas in the sheet? - How is the type handling? Does everything get treated as text or are there date and number types? - Do formatting options for columns (e.g. for number of decimals) survive when I alter things with the API?

- Do updates show immediately (for both directions)?

Yes, changes are apparent immediately.

- What are the limits of read/write queries?

The details are mentioned on https://steinhq.com/pricing.

- What are the limits of rows?

Details available on the pricing page as well. A thing not explicitly mentioned is that you can add any number of rows to a sheet. In append operations, the row limit is not checked.

I'll let you know the other details soon. That's something many have been asking, and I'm deciding what the default behavior should be.

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#63

Post by mirimir »

shivensinha4 wrote: post #61
mirimir wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App is short for application. Web pages with scripting existed for years before anyone called anything an app. Maybe it's just semantics. But it comes off, to me, as pretentious.

Sorry for coming off as pretentious, but that's just the default message that comes with create-react-app. And I conveniently disregarded the idea of making a change!

Hey, thanks :)

Now I know why I've been seeing that error so much.

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#64

Post by 1123581321 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #47
nothrabannosir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of as a disparagement of the product, you could see this as a no-judgement PSA for anyone interested in and capable of running such an alternative. Incidentally I am precisely looking for something like this so for me that’s valuable :)

I didn't "hear" it as suggesting it was a disparagement of the product, more like a "LOL, sure, that's so easy!" sarcasm. "You, too, can do this -- if you are a former astronaut and billionaire. No big!" A lot of advice that "You can easily do it yourself" presumes a fairly high level of skill and knowledgeable in sometimes multiple domains. That presumption isn't crazy talk for the HN audience. Plenty of people will…

I don’t read any of that sarcasm in the comment. And it’s perfectly fine to link a couple Github libraries in a forum full of programmers.

Further down someone has linked a couple other alternatives that are as easy to use as Stein, using a similarly neutral tone.

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#65

Post by felipap »

Zaheer wrote: post #51
felipap wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminded me of the top comment on the "Show HN" of Dropbox, back in 2007: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Lol I was thinking of that comment and was hoping mine wouldn't sound it like it. I'm actually happy Stein exists and think it'll be useful to a lot of people. Part of the reason I used Google sheets was because it was a 'free' DB and so I was just highlighting the free alternative.

I couldn't help but point out the similarity – but I can see where you were coming from as well!

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#66

Post by psteinweber »

latchkey wrote: post #43
lucasverra wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT is my go to solution for quick database needs for prototyping. very simple to share “auto created” documentation for external devs to connect via its marvelous api. plus 1200 row free (infinite tables) is good to start

I'm building something with Airtable now, but definitely see the need to move away from it quickly. More than anything, I just like the appeal of the web UX to get started in designing the data model. It allows me to work with an 'excel guy' in order to figure out what we need for our application. The API, which is very well documented, is far from marvelous. For example, there is no way to use a transaction to updat…

They just raised $100M last November, I wouldn't consider them dead... Probably busy hiring :)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airtable#section-fun...

Re: Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database

#67

Post by fulldecent2 »

At our company, we use an ETL script to suck all our Google sheets into MySQL then we run queries for reporting. It's pretty nice, we'll probably open source it.

The worst part is that as a database, Sheets is not one-tenth as good as MS Access was. You can't enforce constraints or even disable certain people from editing the format of a cell. There's lots of things you can try but you are just one inadvertent copy-paste away from losing formatting/validation rules you had set.

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