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Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

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Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#71

Post by marci »

russnewcomer wrote: post #61
marci wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use-basically-I-wanted-to-have-independent-JSON-instead-of-SQLite-so-in-the-future-maybe-have-a-web-function-to-sync solution sounds like you should use CouchDB, it a database/webserver, so you could make a simple html form on localhost[0], CouchDB is built with replication/sync (over HTTP) as one of it's main feature[1], and on the field, an offline-first webapp with PouchDB[2] and Service Workers[3] could have th…

Nope, that's too much complexity. Because then someone has to run and manage a webserver, and there is no guarantee that ServiceWorkers will work like they do in 5 years or on an ancient Windows7 laptop running IE7. I want this to be able to run for years without my intervention. :)

something that will work in 5 years on ancient windows7 and ie7?

couchdb

there's nothing to manage.

On Windows, you install couchdb.msi or whatever, installed as a windows service, it automatically boots at startup time.

Start IE7 go to localhost:5984/_utils, you get the DB's UI. At that point, all you did was installation.

One click later, you created the first db called 'somedb', a click later, you created the first json doc called 'somedoc'. Now you can access it from localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc.

For the HTML form, just after you created 'somedoc', you can click on "add attachment" and upload someform.html, then go to localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc/someform.html from IE7, no need for anything fancy. After you're gone, someone with the most basic HTML knowledge can make some changes if need be. No Internet required. Will work as long as the laptop works.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#72

Post by time0ut »

treeman79 wrote: post #68
bvinc wrote: post #16

Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production. The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time. Next, his problem was that the databas…

Many many years ago In college, SQL sounded hard. So I built my own database in PHP. Enough said

When I was in university, one of our major projects was to implement a rdbms. Super fun project that taught us a lot of respect.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#73

Post by hnlmorg »

benologist wrote: post #54
bvinc wrote: post #16

Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production. The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time. Next, his problem was that the databas…

I have built this into some software and the reason is when you are developing, and for very limited use cases outside of development it is extremely convenient. Clone my project and start messing around without provisioning a database. It reduced dependencies by hundreds of modules too because all of the connectivity libraries were abstracted into separate modules you'd only install if you wanted that particular typ…

This is why I love sqlite. No provisioning required and you have a flat portable file. But you also have the added bonus that it's highly performant and there isn't much work to refactor your SQL from sqlite3 to most other RDBMS.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#75

Post by mkhalil »

musingsole wrote: post #53
bvinc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried. I held a meeting to talk about the code. I found the problems hard to predict and hard to describe. It was decided that after the meeting he would work more on making his code less hacky and more production ready. But the real answer is that our team was very siloed. No one knew what anyone else was doing. The other problem was that he was actually solving real world problems, and he was a very high performe…

I can sympathize but it seems hard to argue with this developer's approach then. If it met the needs of the company, particularly to the desired level at the times these features were requested, I don't think there's a valid critique of the developer's architecture beyond iT's NoT DoNe CoRrEcTlY. And still, there's a lot to be said for keeping your developer's entertained so they stick around.

I left my last company because one of my co-devs would always do crazy hack-job things, and when I complained to them or higher-ups, the excuse was:

"When?" I asked, considering she had just put up the (big) PR's and PR's ARE the time to review... My jaw dropped. Especially since I was hired on as "Lead" and had all the accountability but no actual power.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#76

Post by theturtletalks »

boynamedsue wrote: post #52
bvinc wrote: post #16

Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production. The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time. Next, his problem was that the databas…

It's easy to get a little laugh from this, but congrats to the guy for exploring. Now he knows first-hand the inordinate challenge and can describe it in detail, but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later.

He took "What I cannot create, I do not understand" to a whole new level.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#77

Post by btown »

bvinc wrote: post #16

Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production. The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time. Next, his problem was that the databas…

> So the next problem was that you couldn't query quickly for things that weren't the primary key. So new columns had to be added called "opt_key1" and "opt_key2" where certain rows could put key values, and indexes could be added on those columns, so you could quickly query by it's first optional key, or it's second optional key.

It's all fun and games until you realize DynamoDB works more or less the same way: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#78

Post by maxpert »

I once built a toy document store using SQLite and Python using almost similar idea, https://maxpert.tumblr.com/post/47494540287/a-document-store... if done correctly the advantage of that approach IMHO is: - ACID (Powered by SQLite) - Complex and efficient Index (Powered by SQLite) - CouchDB like API

I've been playing around with Rust recently maybe I will do a simple implementation in Rust-Lang which will keep it memory safe and efficient.

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#79

Post by colecut »

xienze wrote: post #66
boynamedsue wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to get a little laugh from this, but congrats to the guy for exploring. Now he knows first-hand the inordinate challenge and can describe it in detail, but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later.

> but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later. Depends, I’ve known people who have gone through similar experiences and still poo-poo all those “unnecessarily bloated” solutions like a proper database.

I make crappy thrown together frontends and will probably forever poo-poo the 'unnecessarily bloated' js frameworks

Re: Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

#80

Post by jjeaff »

musingsole wrote: post #53
bvinc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried. I held a meeting to talk about the code. I found the problems hard to predict and hard to describe. It was decided that after the meeting he would work more on making his code less hacky and more production ready. But the real answer is that our team was very siloed. No one knew what anyone else was doing. The other problem was that he was actually solving real world problems, and he was a very high performe…

I can sympathize but it seems hard to argue with this developer's approach then. If it met the needs of the company, particularly to the desired level at the times these features were requested, I don't think there's a valid critique of the developer's architecture beyond iT's NoT DoNe CoRrEcTlY. And still, there's a lot to be said for keeping your developer's entertained so they stick around.

I disagree. It's coder malpractice. There is something to be said for a quick solution that just gets the job done. But each one of the updates described would take more work than just implementing SQLite or similar. Sure, on the outset, do something quick and dirty. By the second or third iteration, any legitimate developer should have switched to a database solution. Creating technical debt for no reason or invalid reasons is just a good way to setup your company for failure.
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