Show HN: EasyDB – A One-Click Ephemeral Database | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: EasyDB – A One-Click Ephemeral Database

easydb.io

158 pointsjustjake57 comments

  db.Put('myKey', {some: 'data'}, (value, err) => {})

It annoys me that it reverses the standard (err, value) callback convention that everyone else uses.

An advantage of the standard is that you might have 0, or 2 or more value arguments to the callback. So you can return (err) or (err, value) or (err, value, optionalExtraValue) and it's fairly consistent.

Wow, that's totally my bad (Write a lot of Go at my day job).

Can definitely fix that one. Will bump to 2.0.0 when I get home.

Method names that start with uppercase is also something you'll see more in Go or C# but not so much in JavaScript. `db.put()` would be the JS way.

I agree on this one. The convention in javascript is that functions names start with a lowercase case letter.

Also very true. Going into V2 deploy that I've open sourced. Will publish it this evening.

Thanks for all the feedback y'all!

I agree with your point. Just want to mention if you are using callbacks, might be worth looking at switching to async/await.

It supports both! If you don't provide a callback it'll return a promise.

Really interesting project. Couple of things:

1. Your Python library (easydbio) doesn't have the correct requirements listed. It depends on 'requests' being installed, add this to the setup.py install_requires call.

2. Make the DB class accept arguments instead of a dictionary. Just do `DB(database, token)`

3. The API is just a really simple CRUD to a single endpoint, why not include curl/httpie samples in the homepage?

4. The repository link for the Python SDK 404's (or is private). People often look at the repositories for dependencies they choose to install, not having it available is not a good signal.

1&2. Python isn't my first choice language so really appreciate that

3&4. Going home to open-source the JS and Python clients. cURL is a good idea, will add that too.

This site is an embodiment of the idea that "good design is when there is nothing left to take away". I was able to very quickly grok what this was, thanks to the simple UX flow of creating a db and then being told how to go play with it.

And yet it completely shits itself when opened in an Android WebView ("An unknown error has occured"). It's not that it can't render - it flashes the site for half a second, then decides to delete itself and just show the error.

Do you have steps to repro this? I can attempt to fix it.

I opened the page with the Androind HN app "Materialistic". I believe it uses the default Android WebView to display the linked website. I don't have any experience debugging things inside a WebView so I unfortunately can't help you much more than that.

This is great! At hackathons in the past, I usually use SQLite for development, and once everything is set, switch over to a more traditional RDBMS. This is a great site that is definitely going in the bookmarks.

Out of curiosity, can you elaborate on the the technologies you used for this (lang, frameworks, hosting services)? I've been trying to learn design patterns for larger software like this, so your insight would be great.

Glad you like it! We used to use a similar method for hackathons in the past, but we were getting tired of always having to configure databases.

We used NextJS for the UI, and Node + LevelDB on the backend.

SQLite is so awesome. I love how python has a library built-in for it.

That SQLite plus SQLAlchemy makes hackathon code so easy to port to another RDBMS after finishing the initial PoC.

Also makes it super easy to run unittests; just load data into sqlite with the memory connector and go!

SQLite is so great. We built this partially because we wanted SQLite's capabilities without deploys blowing away the instance.

This is neat. What's the actual database behind this? What kind of data model/consistency/isolation does it offer?

From @tbtstl's comment

"We used NextJS for the UI, and Node + LevelDB on the backend."

Just to add: Both the frontend and backend use TypeScript.

>What kind of data model/consistency/isolation does it offer?

Each DB is a full new instance (with a mutex for read/write and open/close). Your data isn't shared between any other DB.

It offers read-your-writes consistency since there's no sharding/duplication ATM.

Hopefully that covers it. Otherwise happy to clarify.

Oh also daily backups (Courtesy of https://www.render.com/, which is great BTW)

(Render founder) Thanks for the shoutout and congrats on launch. An ingenious use case for Render disks!

This is really elegant.

One note is that the python repl.it fails on an import error upon just hitting 'run', but it does work locally as expected.

Edit: Was able to get it working in repl.it by updating pyproject.toml like so:

    [tool.poetry.dependencies] 
    python = "^3.7"
    easydbio = "*"

Oh no :(. I'll have to fix that one when I head home in an hour or so.

Thanks for flagging it!

I fixed it here: https://repl.it/@amasad/easydbio-python-example

Super awesome project and it could be great for our users as well. I just posted to our community https://repl.it/talk/announcements/EasyDBio-one-click-databa...

Thanks! Updated on prod.

I see the JavaScript has all the async and callbacks while the Python is simple procedural. What are the benefits of the JavaScript version? It's definitely harder to grok for this newbie.

I also wonder what a plain ole RESTful API would look like. Why does everything need an SDK/library?

Ex:

  import requests //wish this was built in

  token = '07a3e79a-c34c-4603-9a87-3fa47678d37c'
  db = '51e71cb3-a40d-46bc-af3a-7bb77fde04a9'
  key = 'myKey'
  r = requests.get(f'https://easydb.io/{db}/{key}', auth=(token, ''))

I've open sourced the Python and JavaScript clients (https://github.com/EasyDB-io).

I'm also writing up a cURL section to throw on the main page. If you want to implement a client, have at err!

I'll even put a bounty of $5 (Paid in Stellar) for each client implemented.

I appreciate that, don't get me wrong.

Mine was more of a general rant on why every API seems to think it needs its own client. Simply passing JSON back and forth. What could be simpler? What do the clients do?

The tool looks great, seems very easy to use. The UI/UX side of it is on point. The missing information about what the product is makes me hesitant to use it.

I looked through the pages... Tried a few times to find out what happens if I decide to use your tool after the 24H. I looked for a pricing page and failed. Makes sense if this is just your POC/demo.

So yeah, the ambiguity of all this makes it highly unattractive to even evaluate. It doesn't offer any value that a terraform RDS script or even docker-compose script that renders a template to give you the copypasta database init blocks.

Yup, our landing could use some clarification. We'll change it from "You'll be able to use it for 24h" to "Your data will be removed after 24h".

The target demographic is for demo/small projects ATM since it is our POC.

Terraform/docker compose is definitely the way to go for any project with substantial mass. I just got really tired of writing all that when I just wanted a JSON store.

Thanks for the feedback! It's much appreciated :D.

Quick Question - Are you creating an instance of the database when a user clicks "Create a Database" or when they first connect to it?

The database is created when the first CRUD action occurs with a uuid/token combo.

This choice was largely made to not hammer the boxes from the CDN.

Awesome, this will be great for hackathons :D

Looks great! One thing isn’t totally clear to me: Does the database itself get removed after 24 hours, or just the data?

Right now just the data is removed. Your writekey will stay (unless you regenerate it from the dashboard).

Is this open-source?

It is not (Mainly because we have so many hard-coded API keys ATM)

Happy to open-source the clients and ingest them into the landing page if people want to write their own for their favorite lang.

I love this. I would also love an EasyVM.

Like an ephemeral VPS?

Yes. Use cases are numerous. One would be if I want to fork someone’s GitHub to make a pull request without setting up a dev environment. I wish all GitHub projects had a “launch easyVM” button that would give me an ip to a micro instance for 24 hours that I could ssh into. Then I can edit some code, Run the tests (since all the dependencies should be there), push and submit a pull request, with the server auto destroying that night.

You should look into docker for this use case.

Thanks, I've used Docker a lot. Too slow. I want something like EasyDB. Instant. 1 second to get a new ephemeral VM with a preconfigured image. Under the hood it could be launching containers but my experience should be that of a vm user with ssh access.

Take a look at Google Cloud Shell.

Any plans to add a Go library for this?

I've just open sourced the JavaScript and Python client under https://github.com/EasyDB-io.

I've also created a Golang repository (http. https://github.com/EasyDB-io/Golang-Client) just for you. If you're really gungho, feel free to implement the 4 http requests using Go. In fact, If you do, I'll send you $5 via Stellar.

Otherwise I'll have to do it whenever I have a free 20m, but no promises on timeline.

https://repl.it/repls/DefiantRobustCategory

http://github.com/easydb-io/golang

Done :)

this seems cool, but... why?

I hate provisioning infra. It should be easy, and it never is.

I just want some damn state for my lambdas without spinning up Firebase...again.

> I just want some damn state for my lambdas without spinning up Firebase...again.

So true, we have 2 firebase servers (dev & prod) and it took ages to setup them up even with scripts. Some of it; like backing up and restoring users isn't even possible to script!

Fast creation of database instances is a huge benefit in testing

is it possible to clear DB instead of deleting DB after 24 or 72 hours?

This should be the behavior as of right now

what's running behind this? I mean the actual DB. Couch?

That's the worst splash screen I've ever seen.

Hard disagree. There’s a button, I pushed it, I read the code... and said “ohhhh that’s clever”

Excellent constructive feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com