

Ask HN: Examples of Apps with Lots of Data - walesmd

Can any provide examples of web-based applications that return an outrageous amount of data to the user?<p>I'm basically looking for UI/design inspiration for a database querying tool - results will more than likely be returned in a table-based format (similar to Excel).
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mahmud
In case you ever need to generate your own data, I found it MUCH better to
generate the data according to a clean, debuggable grammar, vs using a "test"
database. You can return a spreadsheet with four columns, A, B, C and D for
example, where each recordset would have a column-name prefix and to that you
append a progressively "increasing" string. One sample recordset might be:
(a-aaaa b-aaaa c-aaaa d-aaaa) (a-aaab b-aaab c-aaab d-aaab) (a-aaac b-aaac
c-aaac d-aaac)

The size of your data would depend on the "width" N of your variable string
suffix. In this case N=4 or a dataset of 26^4 when using only lowercase
alphabetical letters a-z.

Predictable data makes debugging trivial. I'm not sure how that helps you with
UI. It goes without saying not to return large datasets via ajax ;-)

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jncraton
If you aren't already familiar with the various web-based DB to tools, that
wouldn't be a bad place to start.

The basic admin interfaces from Rails or Django are probably simpler than what
you are looking for, but you might get some ideas. You've probably used it
before, but exploring phpMyAdmin might be helpful to get ideas for features
and improvements.

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walesmd
Yeah, I was thinking of some of those but couldn't come up with a
comprehensive list... DabbleDB, Zoho DB & Reports, others?

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Tangurena
I can't think of any public facing ones at the moment, but a couple of prior
(subscription or you had to have a series 7 type license) sites I've worked on
would let the user get the data as an excel spread sheet. Sorry.

