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The magic of small databases

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: The magic of small databases

#41

Post by simonw »

LunarAurora wrote: post #31
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your definition of No Code? The quickest way to get a CSV file into Datasette these days is like this: 1. Put the CSV file in a Gist, e.g. https://gist.github.com/simonw/8a2494a3402450716f4c8129d280b... 2. Paste that into the "Load CSV" dialog on https://lite.datasette.io/ to get this shareable and bookmarkable URL: https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubuser... I'm going to keep ticking away…

Datasette is great! I'm not very familiar, but here is my impression : I guess my working definition is about the "default mode". So the (Datasette) Lite version could indeed be "no code" in a similar fashion to the "BI platforms" category above, that is, for read only advanced exploration. In a deeper sense, "no-code" is also about how the software is designed for the ground up. This may include visually customising…

I'm thinking about faceting improvements at the moment - they're such a powerful feature and there's definitely room for making them work and look better.

What do you mean by multivalued columns?

Datasette currently does have support for faceting by JSON arrays, e.g. on this page: https://musiccaps.datasette.io/musiccaps/musiccaps_details?_...

Re: The magic of small databases

#42

Post by tomcam »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #28
tomcam wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damnit I need to register hirequokkas.com and hireibexes.com immediately before one of you sharks beats me to it

"unsoliciteddikdik.com" is available. You know you want to send someone an unsolicited dik-dik.

That was perfect. You win HN for today.

Re: The magic of small databases

#43

Post by osi »

simonw wrote: post #13
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.

i worked at a then-web3.0 startup in the 00’s that had built something that could have been pivoted into this, but instead the CEO wanted to be like Digg instead.

the commercial community of practice is small for sure.

Re: The magic of small databases

#44

Post by 2h »

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…

uBlock Origin blocks that site for some reason

Re: The magic of small databases

#45

Post by Trayja-Peter »

"I want to empower more individuals to publish, maintain and collaborate on small indexes. To build a million tiny libraries, community databases, weird collections and indie indexes."

Funnily enough, a friend and I have been building https://Trayja.com, a tool which does this exact thing, with a focus on the "community" aspect. There's a huge amount of wisdom in communities, whose value could be multiplied if it would be aggregated in a structured, indexable, searchable way. This article articulated so much of what I've been trying to explain about my project.

Re: The magic of small databases

#46

Post by omnipath »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #25
dgudkov wrote: post #21

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.

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 usab…

Yeah, but I think you're underestimating what the grandparent post is saying. The people who would PAY for some of these functions are already making do with Excel. And microsoft has responded in kind by increasing Excel's ability to do, well, everything. I'm pretty sure if someone wanted to include those features the article is talking about on top of Excel, they would. Just last week, we saw someone add onto Excel a C# IDE with debugger, and posted about it here. It seems one's limit with Excel is only one's imagination.

Re: The magic of small databases

#48

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

dmje wrote: post #20

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 collec…

maybe I'm being naive, but 100K records doesn't sound hard to search either. maybe at 5 or 10M it starts getting ugly/expensive

Re: The magic of small databases

#49

Post by mmsimanga »

dmje wrote: post #20

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 collec…

I see you decided on Wordpress, if you were going to use a CMS I think Drupal 7 would have been a good choice. Drupal has concept of entities and views. An entity as the name suggests is essentially a table and you can add all sorts of different fields to it. From simple text and number fields to images and fields that lookup other entities thus creating relationships between entities. Views is another construct that lets you choose how to display the entities. As a list of as a table a two possible views. Most of this can be done in Drupal 7 without writing code. I say Drupal 7 because you mentioned Wordpress. Drupal 8 and above is more of a developer framework and requires knowledge of Composer. Backdrop [0] is fork of Drupal 7.

[0]https://backdropcms.org/

Re: The magic of small databases

#50

Post by LunarAurora »

simonw wrote: post #41
LunarAurora wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datasette is great! I'm not very familiar, but here is my impression : I guess my working definition is about the "default mode". So the (Datasette) Lite version could indeed be "no code" in a similar fashion to the "BI platforms" category above, that is, for read only advanced exploration. In a deeper sense, "no-code" is also about how the software is designed for the ground up. This may include visually customising…

I'm thinking about faceting improvements at the moment - they're such a powerful feature and there's definitely room for making them work and look better. What do you mean by multivalued columns? Datasette currently does have support for faceting by JSON arrays, e.g. on this page: https://musiccaps.datasette.io/musiccaps/musiccaps_details?_...

> faceting by JSON arrays

Yep that's is it. I should have read that facet page in the doc (just used the wrong keyword for search months ago)

btw, I played a bit more with faceting, and it is actually (functionally) good !

Datasette is (going to be) the "mpv" of DBs : An open (in code and in extensibility) standard for reading them. And that plugins system is a godsend. I will certainly delve into it more.

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