Small DB for devs - do you want this?
Hey there, trying to do some research on an idea I had. Devs out there - Do you ever need a small DB for a project? If so - where do you go, how much do you pay?
Developers that don't need a small DB - do you decide to hard code your information in the app because you aren't using a DB? (Is this due to cost, ease, or is there another reason?)
I always find myself in situations where some data persisted somewhere would make my life easier in the long run. IE: dynamically pulling information to show on a page, storing email/form data, storing data to use for future calculations, etc.
I guess my question is - if you had the chance to pay a very small amount every month for access to a DB, would you?
I find Firebase fills this need pretty well and it has a decent free plan. I'll often hard-code information when just prototyping and then later upgrade to Firebase. There might be room for a service that's simpler than Firebase, but I think it will be a challenge to make money. I did notice userbase.com launched recently, which is a simple DB, but they are differentiating by being end-to-end encrypted.
Thanks for the feedback Gabe! userbase.com is pretty cool. Auth implementation is definitely something that people want to offload. Going to continue doing research in this space but I think there might be a small chance for opportunity(with the right idea) like you said.
How would that differ from SQLite or PostGres?
Was thinking more of a DB host, SQLite and PostGres are great solutions! (As long as you have hosting)
If I need to support concurrent reads and writes in a distributed environment, I use PostgreSQL. Otherwise, I default to SQLite, which is a file-based database.
When using PostgreSQL, either Heroku Postgres or AWS RDS, depending on my needs.
Hard-coding is fine if the dataset is very small and static. If it is an internal or a throwaway project, another option is to persist data to a CSV file.
I already pay around $1.04/day to AWS to host PostgreSQL for me. If you ask whether I'd pay for a managed hosting for a proprietary database, then my answer is the strong NO, because I don't want to get that kind of lock-in for a database, which is the integral part of most applications.
£1 a day to host postgres is alot 😲.
That's due to the Multi-AZ failover, where RDS runs two instances of your database. When something goes wrong with the primary instance, it falls back to the standby replica. Thus, it costs twice as much as a database that runs in a single availability zone.
It's also possible to decrease the cost by purchasing reserved instances.
Well that definitely explains it then. Very nice 🎉
Sqlite does the job already.
I actually create tons of stupid demo's (training others + just learning something new and making sure I understand it...). I can get caught between my work laptop and my personal home PC having two different environments.... anyway I found two awesome "db-as-a-service" freemium sites that I now use with 'fake-data generators': elephantSQL (mysql-based) and mLab (mongo...). I really need to prepare more with files I've imported over and over... but i use http://filldb.info/ or for a simple click-and-export or something to use.
No, because there is SQLite.
There is many solutions:
Writing in a JSON, SQLite, installing PostGres locally or using the free tier of any DBaas.
As for paying, OVH offers a very low entry price for a very decent DB : https://www.ovh.ie/cloud-databases/
OVH seems like a great, affordable host
Indeed! I have a dev VM from them and it's really great.
I like to use FaunaDB (http://faunadb.com/) for my projects. Small or big ones.
Did not know this existed. Thanks @Quaresma! I'll check it out
As @Gabe said, Firebase pricing scales well.
I've also used SQLite and locally installed MYSQL, MariaDB, Mongo, PostgreSQL, etc.
Long story short, unfortunately I'm not sure there is a need here.
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oo will check this out, thanks!
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The idea is that this would be used for a small production test. For local development - any local instance of a DB would be fine