
ThingieQuery: $19 SQL IDE for Excel - anakic
http://www.thingiequery.com/
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PeCaN
Dude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer
support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least
half the companies I work with (oil & gas companies—they are addicted to Excel
like it's crack or something) would buy this for quite a bit if it were
marketed at them.

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anakic
Thanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point
for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and
business.

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shocks
Just a thought, you may want to think about changing the name if you're going
after enterprise. Feels a bit amateurish/not serious.

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anakic
Absolutely true. Having trouble coming up with a name. Open to ideas.
Currently I'm thinking "Tabularity", I've bought the domain. Not 100% set on
it, but I'm definitely set on changing the name.

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pash
SQExcel? The domain sqexcel.com is available.

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NKCSS
I'd advise against using the term 'excel' in the product, unless you use it as
'blah for Excel'.

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sourcd
It's not every day that you come across such rave comments about a "Show HN"
kind of thing. Congratulations to the dev.

I'm not familiar with enterprise / Excel requirements & use cases. Could
someone explain why is this such a great product [1]. I wrongly assumed that
excel champs won't be comfortable dealing with SQL because they are either
non-engineers or have been away from programming for way too long.

[1] No offense to the author, I'd love to understand what the enthusiasm is
all about.

~~~
tryitnow
Excel superuser here. There's a lot of excel users who aren't comfortable with
SQL, but I think they're a dying breed. The SQL you need to know for about 99%
of your workflow is something you can learn in a couple of weekends. Most of
the younger people I know learn SQL basics in college (I'm talking about
business people, not just engineers).

Spreadsheets are just really terrible at data manipulation. Good Excel
analysts know this and understand why a query language is so useful.

Data usage is exploding and business users want to roll their own analyses and
not wait around for an IT ticket to be filled. So having business users able
to easily use SQL in Excel makes things a lot more efficient.

Using VLOOKUP functions and pivot tables is just not an elegant solution to a
lot of data problems. A SQL script would be much more useful.

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NKCSS
Little bit of advice:

1) Obfuscate your deliverables

2) Don't store the Licensing information in plain-text in a XML file; it's
trivial to create a generator to generate a valid license for the current
product. Make sure to use a public/private key you sign it and check it, not
giving the client the information to create a valid license if they know the
CPU Id, Hdd s/n's and Nic Mac Adresses.

Other than that: well done, looks great and as others have said: market it for
enterprises and buy a boat :)

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anakic
Thanks!

1 - much debate about this, it's certainly safer to do so

2 - if you take a look at the license again you'll notice the digital
signature field, to make a generator you would need my private key:P

Boat is good, I like boat. :)

~~~
NKCSS
OK, good; I just did a quick decompile and skip through the code to see; glad
you have it covered :)

It's cool to see you stuck with it; looking at your history, it really is a
shame it hadn't got the attention it deserved earlier on:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic)

~~~
anakic
Well it was fun, I felt it was the type of tool I would want for my self in
Excel. Also, not liking ones regular job goes a long way to fuel enthusiasm
for hobby projects:) And it did hit the front page when /u/petepete
crossposted it from reddit last year, which was a big moral boost.

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eloff
Every now and then one sees something on HN that makes you think "why didn't I
think of that?" This is one of those ideas executed very well. My prediction
is this guy makes millions and is eventually bought by Microsoft for a
ridiculous sum of money.

I think he'd be a shoe-in for YC, but I also think that'd be a waste now -
with a product like this he can easily show it off to investors and raise
money, if needed, or just bootstrap off his own revenue. $120K for 7% is not a
good deal with a polished product like this - I think it would be easy to
beat.

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rukuu001
This is an awesome product, but: the name and price-point will not encourage
customers to take the product seriously.

For a while I've been thinking about how hard it is to wean corporate analysts
off Excel (it's their frame of reference) and on to something more
'Enterprise-y', and the solution is to go the other way and scale Excel
instead.

This product is an excellent start at that.

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osullivj
Strongly agree on scaling Excel. Excel is deeply entrenched in corporate
environments because it's the go to tool for users when IT depts can't or
won't deliver what they need. Consequently there's a huge amount of Excel
based end user generated solutions out there that are business critical. Looks
like ThingieQuery has hit a sweet spot for power users working on Excel-as-a-
DB type problems. Another outfit taking the scale up Excel approach is
BlockSpring. Thingie could add a lot of value manipulating BlockSpring
imported data. My own interests lie in Excel-as-calc-engine rather than DB,
and I think there's a lot of value to be had in scaling up calcs by
serverizing.

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svmegatron
That is AWESOME! Nice work!

If I can offer a button nitpick - I suggest "Try it out for free!" in big
text, and "Version 1.5.248.1, 2016-04-26" in small text. Maybe as simple as
wrapping the version info in a <small> tag.

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anakic
Thanks a lot, I'm pretty proud of it!:) That's a good point, the version isn't
really the important part, will do.

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smcl
Wow I just checked and you already updated - fast work!

Also this is a really nice piece of work, great job

~~~
anakic
Yeah, it was simple enough to change and VS was already open, so I figured why
not change it right away... Thanks for the kind words!

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Keyframe
This ought to be a part of Excel. Microsoft, bring out your wallet for this
fine gentleman!

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chaz6
At least Excel 2013 and above has the ability to build models of related
tables, but not full SQL afaik.

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dataminded
This is amazing. Microsoft is going to buy you for a TON of cash. I said it
first! (?)

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anakic
If it happens, I will find you and make sure you get TONS of beer delivered to
your doorstep:)

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dataminded
I am so down for this. I'm also down to grab a beer at any point on your
journey. You should be really proud of what you've built.

~~~
anakic
That sounds awesome! Send me some contact info and I'll get in touch!

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majc2
This provides a lot of value for businesses - therefore I'd definitely charge
more. I would also consider changing the name to something else - "Thingie"
might cause some friction in purchases.

As to setting the price - I'd look at comparables such as Sublime, JetBrains
IDEs/Resharper. I'd be looking at charging at least $49 - but I think $79 to >
$100 would feel right to me.

As to a long term enterprise pricing plan, I dunno - but I'd definitely be
looking at it.

Good luck and well done.

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charlesdm
Looks great, but your pricing sucks. $19, seriously? Multiply that 10-20-50
fold.

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anakic
I like your comment:) That's the home version of it, the commercial is
$149/year per machine. Basically I need traction, and a community of users, so
I'm aiming for it being affordable for people to use at home. I'm hoping this
will transfer into people wanting to use it in their companies which is where
I charge money. As I mentioned before, I'm a complete noob in business and
marketing so I might be going about this very wrong. In any case, I'm very
open to suggestions.

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aantix
Get rid of the "home" version. Your market is business. Up your prices 2-3
fold per license. Rename it.

P.S. And quit claiming you're a noob. You're in business now. So get to
reading on positioning your product and doing some direct outreach.

~~~
anakic
Thank you, all very good points.

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banku_brougham
I fully agree that enterprise version would be in high demand. I work in a
business org at a large tech company. Everybody is an excel user, most are
sort of familiar with SQL but aren't great at setting up ETL jobs. This
product is amazing.

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spdustin
If you support the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLEDB, it's worth
mentioning. That opens up a bunch of additional data sources for folks,
potentially including Active Directory, and suddenly you're (maybe) getting
the attention of enterprise IT folks as well as the business side.

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anakic
Doesn't support it yet, did not think to use it for directory services, that's
an excellent idea! PowerQuery can query ad already though but still, it's
worth investigating. Thanks for the tip.

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iask
Just an FYI...Exact software offer a similar tool like this to enable power
users to query their data. It's not fully loaded as this so you might be up
for grabs if the price is right. Why not connect with them after you review
your value.

~~~
anakic
Any idea what the tool is called? Can't seem to find it on their website

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rayshan
I think he's referring to Power Query / Get & Transform

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retube
As a heavy excel user this is tremendous. I've always wanted to be able to run
SQL queries against a Range.

However: from much experience working in gigantic firms where Excel forms the
core of a like a gazillion work flows and is the default analytics platform -
sadly most users just aren't technical enough for this to be useful to them.
There's probable a niche 1% who'd get value from this. Most people do not
understand databases, SQL, and have little/no experience in any kind of coding
including VBA.

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tryitnow
Google Sheets has a "query" function in which you can write out SQL-like
scripts and I have found it to be tremendously useful. I've been disappointed
that a similarly easy-to-use function doesn't exist in Excel. This is a
solution to that problem.

At first I thought this might not be all that useful given Excel's Power Query
functionality, but then I realized there are still a lot of use cases where
this could come in handy.

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anakic
(I'm the author)

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r00fus
Tried downloading without giving an email addy and it threw "The parameter
'to' cannot be an empty string." with a stack trace - might want to check
inputs?

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soapdog
This is quite impressive! Congratulations! Its cool stuff such as this that
makes the life of a lot of people easier. Good work!

~~~
anakic
Thank you, that's the plan! And hopefully to earn a decent living while I'm at
it:)

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tixocloud
Incredible! I wish this was out before I switched roles. Would've been
extremely useful especially for advanced pivoting.

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erikcw
Looks like it is Windows only. Is it likely that there will be a Mac version
in the nearish future?

~~~
anakic
Unfortunately no. The way it integrates into Excel is only available in Excel
for Windows. Excel for Mac just doesn't have many ways you can talk to it
(that I'm aware of).

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salimmadjd
super bummer! I clicked on purchased with paypal and then decided to check and
make sure if there was mac option or not. It's too bad there is not. I was
ready to buy. That said, great work!

~~~
anakic
It's the thought that counts:) Yeah, it's a shame there's no way to integrate
with Excel for Mac, not a small market either.

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MichaelGG
Wow this is excellent. In telecom, _everything_ gets passed around as Excel
sheets. And people spend non trivial effort screwing around in it. This would
have saved so much time.

Like everyone else said, your pricing and marketing is aiming too low.

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co_dh
Am I misunderstood somewhere? Did you provide a sql interface to excel? are
you asking a DBA to use excel instead of a real database?

For me, it seemed to be more interesting to provide an excel interface to
database.

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anakic
Both really. Some times you don't need the overhead of a database, you just
want to do a damn join in Excel or something.

But also, it has the option to connect to an external database. When
connecting, you can pull Excel tables into the database as temp tables, do
queries (or import the data from the temp tables into permanent tables), and
write results back into Excel. What's more you can automate this, even without
VBA.

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gfosco
Very very well done! I have no use for this right now but I'm buying it anyway
because you deserve the support. Congrats on launching!

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anakic
Thanks, much appreciated!:)

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asimuvPR
Are you open to re-selling? Maybe white label it? If you don't want to talk
about it publicly please email me (check profile). :)

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anakic
Would have to think about it, I think I'd say yes to re-selling, not sure
about white labeling though, to be successful with it I need to build the
brand. Too late here to say anything more, barely awake at the moment:)

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asimuvPR
I will email you. Thanks for the response. Go sleep. :)

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Sukrat
Dayummmm..!!!! (y) That is soooo awesommeee..!!! :)

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itisbiz
Can I use window functions like partition by?

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anakic
If you connect using a SQL Server instance yes, with the built in database -
no, SQLite doesn't have them yet.

I've added some of my own functions to the SQLite engine though, e.g.
ElementAt(pos, elements, orderElements) will return the element at position
pos in a group, ordered by orderElements. Not exactly window functions, but
close.

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jldugger
So... pivot tables?

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anakic
They're good for aggregating data, but they're not designed for precise
querying, manipulating and cleaning data. If they were, we'd likely see
powerpivot replacing sql server management studio:)

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dang
On HN stories are treated as dupes if they have had significant attention in
about the last year, which
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022)
did. If there's something significantly different, it would be best to post
specifically about that.

~~~
anakic
Hi Dang. That's true, it's been less than a year:( It was a hobby project back
then and I've switched to full time now. Trying to launch it properly now.
I've done serious work in the meantime and lowered the price, and I think it's
worth another go. Rules are rules though. Should I remove it?

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dang
Ok, we restored the post and put the price back in the title. Good luck.

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anakic
Thanks a lot! Gosh, analytics instantly going up:)

