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Comment by croisillon | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a side-question but I have been looking for such a thing without really knowing what to look for: is there some kind of small and easy JS and/or PHP programm allowing to do some easy work on a tidy database? Pretty much like you would have a full excel table in a browser where you can add/modify/remove rows and columns? No need for all the excel formulae and such...

Thanks very much for any help.

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Most databases have a companion GUI tool that will allow you to "edit" the database visually; what DB are you using?

pgAdmin (Postgres) - http://www.pgadmin.org/

MySQL Workbench (MySQL) - http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/tools/workbench/

SQL Developer (Oracle) - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-develo...

I strongly recommend learning some SQL though; this will give you the ability to bulk edit columns and apply formulae.

I was thinking TSV in plain text format, not SQL. Hence the option of a pure JS solution?

A TSV is typically referred to as a "flat file". You're going to get a lot of confused looks if you talk about a "TSV database".

That said, you can:

- create an external table in an RDBMS (any of the above will work), which allows you to work on a flat file in place: http://www.fromdual.com/csv-storage-engine

- import the TSV to an RDBMS, work with it, and export it again.

I'm sure someone has written what you're asking for, but I don't get the appeal. RDBMS aren't scary, you can install MySQL and work with it for free, and if you use the GUI tool you don't even have to touch SQL.

edit: Excel is a tool that can edit TSV files, and as a bonus it looks and works exactly like Excel. What exactly do you want?

I see. Well thanks for your answer. Maybe I know better what are the options now and what I'm looking for at all :)

As I say, the idea would be to edit a database/file directly on the web (i.e. no local excel file). Since the original post talked about TSV I thought there might be a niche for such a light JS editor.

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