
JackDB Heroku Plugin - Explore Your Databases In Your Browser - sehrope
https://github.com/jackdb/jackdb-heroku-plugin
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programminggeek
It took me a few clicks to figure out what JackDB is.

With all the new datastores out there, ending your project with DB seems to
imply it's yet another database, then you go to your homepage and I have to
click the about button to even figure out what the product might be.

Also, I kind of hate the tagline "make a lasting connection with your data".
Given that your homepage only shows that and 2 buttons, it seems that you
really want me to "make a lasting connection with my data" more than figure
out what your product is. Why would someone even click the "Try JackDB Now"
button if they don't know what it is or does?

<http://www.jackdb.com/home.html> is a much better page and maybe it should be
your hope page. It certainly explains your product better.

On a side note, I'm not sure that there is a market willing to pay $12 or $29
a month for a web based database client, but I can see the basic appeal. Best
of luck!

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sehrope
Thanks. This is actually great feedback for us.

The distraction-free splash page is designed for first impressions. For return
visitors, we make it easy to log in or try JackDB in a couple of clicks. We're
always trying out new things with our design.

Our vision for JackDB is building a ubiquitous platform for working with data.
Hence, "Make a lasting connection with your data."

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sehrope
Hi founder here - Hopefully the github page does a decent job explaining how
it all works. If not, I can answer any questions you guys have.

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ozataman
Believe it or not (given we live in the age of gmail and the cloud), the big
issue for me is trust. How am I supposed to provide login information on
mission critical databases, get the convenience of using a cloud-based product
AND sleep well at night?

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sehrope
This is a great question.

Of course, trust is an ongoing concern. Being upfront about how we handle
security is a start. There's already a lot of trust in *aaS platforms, and we
think JackDB is a great tool for building new data-driven projects in the
cloud.

We also offer enterprise and private cloud deployments of JackDB.

I'll personally answer any security-related questions that people have.

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benologist
This looks really nice but the plan structure is very weird.

Why do I need to know or care how many concurrent connections my querying or
administration requires? Is this to stop people having more than one tab open?
Why can't you just use connection pooling and probably not exceed more than 2
or 3 regardless?

The tiny limits on returned rows means many tasks are going to made tedious,
simple stuff like pulling out every name/email subscribed to a mailing list is
going to take multiple queries even on the pro plan.

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sehrope
As we scale up JackDB, we'll be bumping up the usage limits and revising our
pricing plans.

Connection pooling doesn't really make sense in this context because users
can't share a database connection; if one is in the middle of a transaction,
he could get clobbered by the other's work.

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benologist
Connection pooling usually happens at the driver level, basically when you
'close' a connection it doesn't typically close it just gets flagged as ready
to be re-used so the next query doesn't suffer the full overhead of
establishing the connection.

Unless you're counting connections in some other way (or persisting them?)
this means in the pro plan for instance I would need up to 20 literally-
concurrent queries executing to actually use those connections at the same
time which is really only applicable in a web-facing situation where you might
have 10s or 100s or 1000s of concurrent users running queries.

From a technical stance an entire team of people accessing the database may
fit within the '2' connections of the most basic plan just because there's not
enough people to trigger high enough concurrency to require additional
connections.

In an administration etc context it seems extremely unlikely unless I've got
some long running queries which are also unlikely in a session/browser based
service since the odds of closing before a query completes are too high.

It would make much more sense to charge directly based on the number of
_people_ actually administrating the database.

It would also be cool to see "plug your S3 credentials in" and have backups
taken care of, this is something MongoHQ does and it's beautiful in its
simplicity.

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skram
This is great. Any plans to support nosql datastores like couch and mongo?
These datastores could really use an exploratory interface like JackDB.

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sehrope
Thanks! Definitely. NoSQL support is coming soon, starting with MongoDB.

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goldfeld
I assume you didn't focus on MongoDB first because there's already MongoHQ.
How does their admin interface compare to your open source project and to your
paid solution?

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sehrope
Although JackDB works great as a management and administration tool, a big use
case is developers and DBAs running ad-hoc queries and digging deep into their
data sources. We don't host databases.

To start, our focus has been on building an interface for SQL databases
(Postgres, MySQL, etc). We're still polishing our support for MongoDB and
other NoSQL databases.

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skram
Would be awesome if the connection part of jackdb could be open sourced so the
community could help bring NOSQL support. I understand you've got to make a
living though. Just think of all the DBs you could support if you used an ORM
(just thinking about Ruby there us Sequel, ActiveRecord, DataMapper).

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abeh
this looks great. since i switched to postgres from mysql, i was missing
something like sequel pro. i tried induction, but it is buggy. will be trying
this out shortly!

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ozataman
I've had good experience with Navicat.

~~~
abeh
thanks, will look at this too.

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zht
so in other words, a prettier looking phpMyAdmin

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sehrope
JackDB is about more than just database administration. There's nothing to
install. And it's much more interactive.

