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Comment by LunarAurora | Hacker News Reader

There are categories of “Nocode” online services that could work, more or less, as small databases. Some are already cited in the article:

- DBs platforms (Best for more advanced DB) : Airtable, getgrist.com

- wikis+DB platforms (Best for building a site around the DB) : notion.so, coda.io

- Airtable/GSheet publishing (Best for simple/custom UI) : glideapps.com, siteoly.com

- Bookmarks/Collections (Best for links/References) : Zotero (online groups), are.na

- List sharing (Best for open collaboration?) : listium.com, (ranker.com ?)

- BI platforms (Best for advanced filters/charts) : polymersearch.com, Google Data Studio

- Data Set Hosting (Best for downloading?) : data.world, kaggle.com

All these allow publishing, and some collaboration

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What about Datasette and/or Dolt.

My list included nocode services only.

What's your definition of No Code?

The quickest way to get a CSV file into Datasette these days is like this:

1. Put the CSV file in a Gist, e.g. https://gist.github.com/simonw/8a2494a3402450716f4c8129d280b...

2. Paste that into the "Load CSV" dialog on https://lite.datasette.io/ to get this shareable and bookmarkable URL: https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubuser...

I'm going to keep ticking away at making this as easy as possible for people (I have a paid SaaS product on the way, but I want people who just want to publish something small to free to be able to do so) but I'm interested in understanding what it would take to qualify as "no code" in your book.

I would consider datasette and its plugins nocode.

Datasette is great! I'm not very familiar, but here is my impression :

I guess my working definition is about the "default mode". So the (Datasette) Lite version could indeed be "no code" in a similar fashion to the "BI platforms" category above, that is, for read only advanced exploration.

In a deeper sense, "no-code" is also about how the software is designed for the ground up. This may include visually customising/configuring most of the settings/plugins and all those delicate UX touches for the "average-user".

Personally, I'm waiting for two things : better facets and support for multivalued columns (I really like my openrefine for local or polymersearch for online)

I'm thinking about faceting improvements at the moment - they're such a powerful feature and there's definitely room for making them work and look better.

What do you mean by multivalued columns?

Datasette currently does have support for faceting by JSON arrays, e.g. on this page: https://musiccaps.datasette.io/musiccaps/musiccaps_details?_...

> faceting by JSON arrays

Yep that's is it. I should have read that facet page in the doc (just used the wrong keyword for search months ago)

btw, I played a bit more with faceting, and it is actually (functionally) good !

Datasette is (going to be) the "mpv" of DBs : An open (in code and in extensibility) standard for reading them. And that plugins system is a godsend. I will certainly delve into it more.

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