No Code Tool Recommendation That Solves This?

Hey Katie,

Sorry for the following wall of information but hopefully it helps a bit.

I'm not aware of any ready made solutions because from a coding perspective, trying to get information from the public database you're talking about requires knowing how that database is set up and serves that information. It's unlikely there is a catchall pre-made solution for all databases as they're all set up differently.

Without knowing anything about the database and assuming the information you want is on a website that serves the data from the database. Most people opt for using a web scraping tool which requires you to learn how to use that tool (often pretty easy, 1-3 hours learning). This is sometimes frowned upon because if you're scraping a lot of data it'll put a strain on their network. If the developers wanted you to take that information, they'd provide an api for it (or charge for access to their api). I've made my own scrapers in the past but often it only works for that one site that I'm scraping since every site's page structure and map are set up differently and I only made it for general knowledge gathering, not really for the purpose of stealing someones data and serving it elsewhere.

If you do know how the database is set up and serves the data, for instance lets say the database's information is served through a public restful api, you can use google apps. I just searched youtube for 'getting data to google sheets with restful api' and got this result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4I6cyE5TA There are probably better ways of doing this but without knowing exactly what you're doing I can't really recommend something better.

If this public database is your database, then you can probably use zapier. I just registered an account to check it out and it looks like they support a few: oracle, aws, mongo, and caspio. If this is the case and your database is one set up on one of those cloud databases then all you would need to do is pass the right credentials and hook it up to the app of your choice. (probably sheets).

A custom no to little code solution is going to be difficult to find unless it's a common issue. I think the best way I can put it is that it's like trying to communicate without using language. Everyone needs to use the bathroom so you can often communicate this using little to no language support since it's a common problem no matter where you are in the world. However, the more custom and complex your requests get, it'll be more and more difficult to get the results you want without knowing the language and how things work in the location you're at. If there aren't enough people in the world that want what you want with a similar set up, then it's not worth it for a business to provide that service (which is what companies like zapier do.) Someone has to code that 'no-code' solution but if there aren't enough users, then there's no point in coding it.

How you approach this problem really depends on what you need, how you need it, what you have access to, and for what purpose.

Hey Katie, founder of makerpad.co here 👋

Interesting problem and would love to make a tutorial here.

Perhaps something like actiondesk, retool, clay would be useful here? If you find out, let me know and we can dive in and make tutorials around it