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The magic of small databases

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: The magic of small databases

#3

Post by xnx »

"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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#5

Post by zokier »

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#6

Post by btown »

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#8

Post by gcanyon »

zokier wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#9

Post by fbdab103 »

btown wrote: post #6

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 datab…

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/

Re: The magic of small databases

#10

Post by gavinmckenzie »

zokier wrote: post #5

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.

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.
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