Show HN: Run SQL on Spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Run SQL on Spreadsheets

spanrr.com

43 pointsnafey18 comments

Hi HN, We are Nafey and Akhil, founders of Spanrr. After spending months building apps on spreadsheets and working with existing spreadsheets api we realized while people might need customisable apps, what they really prefer any day is a better spreadsheet.

Key differentiators:

  - You can write SQL queries on your spreadsheet. You can also do JOIN queries across spreadsheets, do summaries and statistics. 
  - Easily handle millions of rows smoothly  
  - API out of the box for your data so you can wire it to other systems.  
  - Import your CSV or Excel files and run SQL queries over  
  - Native connection to MySQL database  
  - Save SQL queries for future use

Upcoming features :

  - Connection to PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MongoDb.  
  - Self hostable version.  
  - Granular permission.  
  - Version control and error checking.  
  - Command-line based access.  
  - Connect Spanrr directly to your Web application as a MySQL database.

Please let us know any use cases for which you want to try it out or if you like to see anything new on the product.

We’ll be here all day answering your question.

Its really useful tool to have for non technical people. Waiting to see the final product soon.

Pretty interesting

> Write SQL queries atop of your spreadsheet data. Even, JOIN queries across spreadsheets.

Excel has supported this out-of-the-box for decades, though the process is a little convoluted.

We have found it a very cumbersome process to set up SQL support on excel. We are building this spreadsheet ground up to work well with SQL and databases in general. Also we have built this spreadsheet in such a way that it can handle millions of rows which is another place where excel does not provide good user experience.

I signed up to check out Spanrr. I find it useful for preview of our data from database, by non-tech stuff. Seems we could use this as a CRM for our business.

Do you plan to implement auto-complete / suggestions for queries, so it is easier for our stuff to use more advanced queries?

Yes autocomplete for query is something we will be working on in near future.

A good took for non developers. For PMs who are handy with basic SQL, spannr is a good tool to reduce dependency on data analysts. PMs can quickly run all sorts of analysis on the data. Looking forward to extension of the tool for marketers too.

I'm not sure if I get it. Is this a web app with a spreadsheet-like UI (like https://datagridxl.com)?

Spanrr is a browser based spreadsheet application which comes with SQL support. Datagrid is a frontend component so it is not quite what we are offering.

If you don’t need joins, you can filter, aggregate, and manipulate a table in SQL in Google sheets already using =QUERY().

I like the idea! Let’s say I have a 10Gb spreadsheet. How much is that going to cost per month to host and query?

We would love to discuss your use case. Please drop me a mail at Nafey at spanrr.com.

ok i get the sql over spreadsheet but what about actual spreadsheet features? will i be writing spreadsheet-esque formulas? adding visualizations directly in the spreadsheet? can i create custom formulas? etc... very promising thank you.

Is this similar to Airtable? It's fine if it is, I think this is a difficult problem with a large market.

Both behaves like relational DB...yes.

But here you can process millions of rows, bring in data from intercom,hubspot, database natively and you will get much better APIs ( and limits) to build apps on top of :)

The website design looks very lovely!

Hey,Thanks.

We re-used our old failed ideas design because we didn't have time. Happy to learn you liked it.

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