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Closed 13 years ago.
Is Google Spreadsheets / Docs a viable database option for real-world applications?
Without knowing what this application does, I'd say no. Simply on the basis that a spreadshet != a database.
no, a spreadsheet and a database are distinct concepts. Spreadsheets do not allow you to query the data. Spreadsheets (especially "hosted" like Google's) will not support real world load.
Depends on your application. As a database, typically not. It can be useful in instances where you need "Excel With Web Features" or as an alternative to a database.
Especially now that Spreadsheets, Presentations and Docs are all basically used under the "Google Docs" moniker, the entire "Google Docs" suite is best used as the sum of its parts.
Two examples:
Web forms. Create a form using the Forms application, and all its entrants are stored in a Google Spreadsheet. Personally I've found this to be a pretty quick and easy way to collect names and contact information online, and its all output into a very easy-to-use and portable format.
Using the spreadsheet to interact with other web content. See this example of displaying and grabbing content from Wikipedia for editing: http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/
You might see for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite to use in applications, for example, to archive my books.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
Are there cases where database designers are not allowed to know the details of the data? I am looking for real-world examples to learn from — please.
I can't help but tell a story about database nightmares. One of the worst was when Amazon was first growing. Initially they only sold books, then expanded to music, and then to many other things.
For a period of about two years, Amazon would announce a new market every two or three months -- children's clothing, housewares, garden supplies, food, and so on. The database folks were tasked with developing and supporting the systems for the product lines. However, Amazon considered the new product announcements to be highly, highly secret.
In particular, the data warehouse people would be kept further from the loop. Sometimes, they would find out about a new line of business by reading news -- and then have to support it in the data warehouse.
So, they had to develop a flexible database to meet unannounced business needs.
In any business environment, there are new needs that arise. I would suggest a book such as Ralph Kimball's "Data Warehouse Toolkit" for more background on how to develop a fairly robust system.
I am currently working at a company that stores very private personal information. I am not allowed access to the production database. For our development and test environments, we replace all names, addresses, and other personal information with randomly generated information.
Yes, I've often seen databases allow for custom data to be defined by the user. The basic approach is to design a meta data system for your database. Then allow entities associations with custom fields. You wouldn't want to do this for all your data, otherwise you'll just end up with a database in a database, but for dynamically adding a number of custom fields this approach works well.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I was trying to save directed graphs into databases for further processing and query. And neo4j seems to fit my needs. However, I don't seem to find a good tutorial regarding the following:
Creating the database and put data in.
Making queries.
I want to be able to do them both manually and automatically (i.e. using a program). The official manual keeps talking about stuff like Maven, Index, REST API and so on, basically things I don't care about at all for now.
So any good hands-on tutorial on neo4j? Or any other graph databases you think is good for total beginners with simple needs (i.e. store graph and query graph)?
For getting started just download the Neo4j Server and start it. Then go to http://localhost:7474 for the integrated web-admin UI which allows you to enter data visually and browser/visualize and query it.
Please have a look at the Neo4j Koans by Jim Webber and Ian Robinson which are material that are used in real-world tutorials. Otherwise also have a look on http://video.neo4j.org for some screencasts and presentations and the collection of introduction links at the neo4j delicious site.
I started a blog for Neo4j beginners. The first four posts are up and they show you how to get neo4j, install it, create some sample data, find friends of friends, six degrees of separation (path finding), use gremlin scripts and cypher queries.
Try http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/snapshot/tutorials-java-embedded.html or http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/snapshot/ for more tutorials. Does that work?
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Closed 10 years ago.
So I am working on a mini-project for the summer to keep my coding skills sharp. I will be using the Qt4 and C++ to make a classroom management system for college professors. I just came up with the idea like 10 minutes ago so I don't have much.
One question I have is what is the best way to store student/class/assignment information so that the software could still be portable and used my different schools.
My first guess would be a MySQL database. I need a gurus opinion on this one though.
Since different sites have different database preferences you might wish to use a layer such as ActiveRecord or PDO or ODBC to abstract out the specific database that your end users want to use. This would allow people to deploy onto PostgreSQL or MySQL or whatever they prefer.
A good choice for single-process server systems could be SQLite3. It's not suitable for all systems, but if your system is designed to scale to a few dozen users at most, it'll probably work fine. (The amount of work you'd need to put into a server to make SQLite3 scale into the hundreds or thousands might argue for planning for a database server environment instead.)
http://www.sqlite.org/
might be a good option. It is embeddable so you don't need a specific database instance running wherever you deploy it
also, http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/compact.aspx is an option
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Closed 9 years ago.
What applications/IDEs are out there to develop BASE database systems from?
BASE systems (Basically Available,
Soft state, Eventually consistent) are
an alternative to RDBMS, that work
well with simple data models holding
vast volumes of data. Google's
BigTable, Dojo's Persevere, Amazon's
Dynamo, Facebook's Cassandra are some
examples.
It seems like you are looking into the recently popular NoSQL moniker for "databases". Which also includes MongoDB, Voldemort (must not be named), Hbase, Tokyo Cabinet, and CouchDB. There are a lot of them. I am not sure what your question is?
Each one has its own advantages, implementation difficulty, and performance differences. Although they are all designed to scale. There are some good articles on highscalability.com, http://highscalability.com/blog/tag/nosql
Then there are the systems that are designed to enhance and scale searching from traditional databases (i.e. MySQL). For example, Solr based on Lucene. That's more geared towards full text searching. That falls in the "eventually consistency" since it synchronise with the database periodically.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Where can I get, or how can I generate a large formatted collection of fake user data (names, email address, locations, etc.) that can be used for testing an application?
It can be clearly fake, this will be limited to the development server. But I'm sure anything would be better than what I could come up with.
There are some tools built just for this. I've used http://www.generatedata.com/ before to generate data for MySql databases. RedGate has a nice tool to fill your SQL Server database with test data called SQL Data Generator. The RedGate tool costs about $300, but there is a free trial.
UPDATE:
Faker.js is now available. It is a project built on node.js, and looks pretty comprehensive.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mockaroo is great!
If you'd like an HTTP API of fake user data, check out Random User Generator
This is a open source tool for generating various types of test data. http://www.generatedata.com
http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ is a good resource for creating test data with realistic looking users complete with SSN, email address, ... They have a bulk download option too.
Check out this list of "Funny Names" some of them are classic
http://www.ethanwiner.com/funnames.html
Another open source test generator tool is my own http://code.google.com/p/csvtest.
For anyone looking for an updated solution to this problem...
I wrote a test data generator project for Data Synchronisation Studio. It can generate a large dataset ranging from 1 to 100s of millions of rows of realistic testing data (lots of OFs there :D) Anyway, here is a blog post all about it. http://www.simego.com/Blog/2012/02/Test-Data-Generator-Download-for-Data-Sync