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Comment by brainless | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here feel the need for PopSQL?

I am asking this because I was building on a similar idea a couple years back as a side project. I lost track but got curious seeing PopSQL.

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I got quite excited by that entry. My immediate reaction was 'oh, that's really cool'. But after thinking a little further, I can't think of an audience that both uses SQL frequently and also couldn't use a git repo. What kind of user demographic did you have in mind?

My target audience was basically every non-programmer in a team who wants to see/track any kind of data for their own product.

The SQL building would be for programmers to setup say a few initial queries. But anyone can change (there would be a changelog) and share new things to track.

Thanks; I've yet to meet any sql-wielding non-programmers in the wild.

Perhaps it's worth releasing after all?

Just an anecdote, but my dad learned SQL 10 years before retirement. It helped him do his work, which was not software development, without burdening the professional programmers.

Of course, there are plenty of free and slick GUIs offering the basics of Git. I'd like to see how this is better. Maybe customer service?

Reportedly you have a lot of customers. How did you find them? Any tips to share? Thanks :-)

SQL queries for non production uses feel more like “quick documents” and having to interact with git every time you want to share would be a pain. (Imagine telling people to share google docs via a git repo). And I say this as a coder who loves git. So many companies will have sql in their wiki docs eg in one note or even in slack for ease of sharing.

> an audience that both uses SQL frequently and also couldn't use a git repo.

I think you might be surprised. SQL is used a lot in businesses by non-programmers. It's embedded in all sorts of enterprise software, including SME stuff like Salesforce.

"Can't" is a strong word. Maybe they could use git, but most don't.

The Dropbox kind of demographic?

Indeed there's a need... We were putting common SQL queries in the code repository for later copy-pasting in the past, but we stopped doing that when we discovered Metabase (https://metabase.com/). I believe it will be relatively hard for PopSQL to compete with it, since Metabase is light ears ahead as of now.

We use BigQuery where I work, it has a "saved queries" feature. I suppose this could be like a poor man's BigQuery?

There is also a similar open source alternative: Poli (https://github.com/shzlw/poli) Disclaimer: I work on Poli.

There’s also Mode Analytics ( https://mode.com ).

Being able to share queries was one of the more attractive things about Looker in the beginning.

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