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The magic of small databases

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: The magic of small databases

#11

Post by btown »

fbdab103 wrote: post #9
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/

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#12

Post by pstuart »

gavinmckenzie wrote: post #10
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.

FoxPro on the Mac was wonderful. I learned SQL wrangling with analytics on it -- there weren't all the options we have today.

Re: The magic of small databases

#13

Post by simonw »

simongray wrote: post #7

This post is an exercise in describing the motivation and features of the Semantic Web seemingly without realising the tech stack already exists.

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#14

Post by LunarAurora »

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

Re: The magic of small databases

#16

Post by nerdponx »

LunarAurora wrote: post #14

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/Ref…

What about Datasette and/or Dolt.

Re: The magic of small databases

#18

Post by digitalsankhara »

gcanyon wrote: post #8
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.

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.

Re: The magic of small databases

#19

Post by LunarAurora »

nerdponx wrote: post #16
LunarAurora wrote: post #14

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/Ref…

What about Datasette and/or Dolt.

My list included nocode services only.

Re: The magic of small databases

#20

Post by dmje »

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/

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