Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Database
steinhq.com
steinhq.com
Submit form: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37743080
Get data from sheet: https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop
Happy to answer any questions.
Find it at https://github.com/SteinHQ/Stein
Incidentally I am precisely looking for something like this so for me that’s valuable :)
Dropbox came at a time when people were seeing the downsides of private solutions and the cloud was there to mitigate them. These days people are starting to see the downsides of relying on the cloud and are moving to private solutions.
The main difference is today's "private solution" is likely to be a self-hosted "cloud". So it's not that we're going back in time a decade, it's just choosing a combination of "private" and "cloud" that maximizes the advantages and minimizes the disadvantages.
All available evidence is contrary to this point.
But going back to OP's comment above and the link to the Dropbox topic, a decade ago many were not seeing the move to the cloud as anything more than a gimmick compared to the established private solution, not seeing the trend.
P.S. Just to be clear, by "private solution" I don't mean hosting in your own basement. It's retaining control over your solution even if it is hosted in someone's datacenter.
A lot of advice that "You can easily do it yourself" presumes a fairly high level of skill and knowledgeable in sometimes multiple domains. That presumption isn't crazy talk for the HN audience. Plenty of people will have the requisite background knowledge to jump on a comment suggesting a DIY alternative.
But that in no way means there isn't a market for the product. Plenty of people may need or want X and not have the capacity to do it themselves, even with some instruction.
Further down someone has linked a couple other alternatives that are as easy to use as Stein, using a similarly neutral tone.
https://sheety.co (No pricing)
- Do updates show immediately (for both directions)?
- What are the limits of read/write queries?
- What are the limits of rows?
- Can I use formulas in the sheet?
- How is the type handling? Does everything get treated as text or are there date and number types?
- Do formatting options for columns (e.g. for number of decimals) survive when I alter things with the API?
Everything is converted to JSON over the API, so it's all just text and numbers.
Yes, changes are apparent immediately.
- What are the limits of read/write queries?
The details are mentioned on https://steinhq.com/pricing.
- What are the limits of rows?
Details available on the pricing page as well. A thing not explicitly mentioned is that you can add any number of rows to a sheet. In append operations, the row limit is not checked.
I'll let you know the other details soon. That's something many have been asking, and I'm deciding what the default behavior should be.
I would just use Postgres as a database, personally.
Sure, if you host those, you might as well host a proper database (you already do), but for quick prototyping might be useful, or as I said, just fun :)
The worst part is that as a database, Sheets is not one-tenth as good as MS Access was. You can't enforce constraints or even disable certain people from editing the format of a cell. There's lots of things you can try but you are just one inadvertent copy-paste away from losing formatting/validation rules you had set.
The API, which is very well documented, is far from marvelous. For example, there is no way to use a transaction to update two (or more) tables at the same time. It is also rate limited to a tiny 5 requests per second, even under paid plans. The API also does not allow you to request relational data in one request. You make a request to get the parent id, then all the children, by parent id, in a separate request.
I'll also say that the company feels a bit dead. You look at the changelog and they add a couple features here and there, while other features, such as barcode scanning (probably a weekend hackathon feature) languish by the wayside. They respond quickly to support requests with answers like 'we will add that to the long list of things we want to do'... riiigght...
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airtable#section-fun...
The only issue in large sheets is sometimes you get time outs.
The setup of the sheet and the sharing has to be done using the api key
Why are people referring to html+script as apps?
Begins with:
<!doctype html>
<script>!function(c){function e(e) ... </script>
Maybe it's just semantics. But it comes off, to me, as pretentious.
Now I know why I've been seeing that error so much.
> Handlebars
<!--- Replace the data-stein-url value with your API URL --->
<div
data-stein-url="http://api.steinhq.com/v1/storages/5cc158079ec99a2f484dcb40/Sheet1"
>
<div>
<h1>{{title}}</h1>
<h6>By {{author}}</h6>
<p>
{{content}}
</p>
<p>Read on <a href="{{link}}">Medium</a></p>
</div>
</div>
Since when is this no-JS?!
NO JS means NO JAVASCRIPT and not no need to write JavaScript.
No HTML templating wizardry!