The magic of small databases

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.

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.

That’s not really analogous and kind of misses some of the other aspects the author talks about.

Excel doesn’t cover the publishing and discovery aspect. It is absolutely atrocious from a machine usability and schema perspective, nevermind performance, etc.

Even if you think excel does address those, I think the shortcomings of the format should rule it out. It is better to have a more powerful tool, and fix the usability aspects, rather than trying to proverbially rub glitter on what amounts to a turd of a format.

This is a really cool niche... and I love the idea of it being more generally applicable or extensible to the kinds of private collections of objects that the writer is describing. (I really like what the article seems to be arguing for).

It seems like the data storage / search / filtering aspects of your software would be really fun and interesting to develop flexible solutions to. The Wordpress aspects probably wouldn't be so fun to maintain, but it's always pick-your-poison when it comes to CMSs unless you develop your own in-house.

That being said, a collection CMS doesn't necessarily need to have all the plugins and doodads that a Wordpress site does. It could be something bare-bones and extensible that was written to be more tightly coupled to a layer that interpreted the underlying data structure. Just toying with the idea, maybe even something that flattened the data views of the collection into static webpages for deployment so that at least some of the indexing could be handled by naming conventions and directory structure without recourse to database searches.

The world could definitely use an open source kit along these lines, with a GUI backend that would let non-developers build their own table structure and search parameters, draw up some page layouts, and just generate a searchable site that collated CSV records with images.

Some of this actually reminds me of what HyperCard could do... it allowed some really interesting experiments with user-classified data. Like this, from 1989: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/225955134.pdf

Relational stuff is hard, as you say, but in a structure built around a collection it seems like you could come up with a DSL that defined which columns needed to relate to other tables (any column with repeating data, for instance), suggest making that column "normalized", and automatically generate a linked table.