Dropbox-as-a-Database
blog.opalang.org
Dropbox-as-a-Database
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#2I've used .json files in place of a database before on a read-only site. It worked very well. I do believe that we over-engineer some times and use databases when flat files will do just fine.
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#3It is a fun exercise to do these kinds of things. Obviously, they are very inefficient. But that is not the point! Perhaps there's some residual value related to some Dropbox feature (such as automatic replication) that makes this useful . But that is countered by getting your account rate-limited by Dropbox.
I wonder, is there some way to create a key-value store out of any physical or virtual object that can store state? I know there is a lot of work done with quantum computing to store state in quarks. I can see that has value.
But, what is the most inefficient data storage mechanism you can come up with? Here are a few I can think of:
Instagram-as-a-database - You issue a request to save your data, we encode it using some visual encoding scheme, take a picture, and then upload it somewhere. You get returned a URL, and can then decode it or update it.
MTurk-as-a-database - The possibilities are endless here. Someone could write down your request on a piece of paper and then you could send another request where they type it back.
Twilio-as-a-database - Encode your data as an audio stream. Store it in random voicemail boxes. Retrieve it later by calling up, listening to your voicemail, decoding the messages.
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#4It seems rather generous to call this a database. It's files on a filesystem. The lack of any kind of transactional consistency guarantees (Dropbox is notoriously awful at this), and the lack of any sane mechanism for querying this "database" means that it's just "data", not a "database".
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#5Reminds me of the GMail filesystem: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#6Your blog design is bad btw, popout at side overlays scroll bar in Windows/Chrome.
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#7Actually I have the exact same idea like a few weeks ago. The potential for this idea is big. It can be widely used by small web apps (Chrome App). Instead of hosting a server and a database, every thing can be done and stored in the client, isn't that neat?
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#8Your blog design is bad btw, popout at side overlays scroll bar in Windows/Chrome.
It's one of the design proposed by Google, blame them :)
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#9It seems rather generous to call this a database. It's files on a filesystem. The lack of any kind of transactional consistency guarantees (Dropbox is notoriously awful at this), and the lack of any sane mechanism for querying this "database" means that it's just "data", not a "database".
I think he calls it "database" because it is strongly integrated with the database syntax of the Opa language. You can declare and use this "dropbox-database" just like a Mongo one, independently of the notion of safe-ness of the database.
Re: Dropbox-as-a-Database
#10It is a fun exercise to do these kinds of things. Obviously, they are very inefficient. But that is not the point! Perhaps there's some residual value related to some Dropbox feature (such as automatic replication) that makes this useful . But that is countered by getting your account rate-limited by Dropbox. I wonder, is there some way to create a key-value store out of any physical or virtual object that can store…
quantum computing to store state in quarks
Atoms or electrons, but not quarks.