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Ask HN: What do you think about CSV to Postgres?

1 points by kvaranasi_ ↗ HN
Hey HN,

What do you guys think of CSV spreadsheets to Postgres DB? Most brick and mortar companies have their data in CSV file. They might not have the expertise to spin up AWS RDS DB or other complicated setups. Do you think a cloud hosted Postgres + an option to convert their CSV files to tables on Postgres would be useful?

Is it possible? Has this been done before? Is it something that you would be willing to pay for? What could be some pros and cons?

Please discuss your thoughts.

10 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] thread
brodouevencode
Postgres has a mechanism for importing CSVs. Not sure what the value of something like this would add.
kvaranasi_
I think this is probably by using a COPY command. Assuming the file is on the same server as Postgres. But from a windows/linux machine, if a user wants to upload the CSV file, I don't see any options in the market.
codingdave
I don't see the use case. CSV imports are fairly standard tasks, not rocket science. Anyone without the skills to handle such a routine thing wouldn't know what to do with a bunch of tables in an RDS DB anyway.
kvaranasi_
Ok, but what if we create an analytics dashboard for them. Basically the user will upload a CSV and a dashboard with charts will be created. I too don't know the use case exactly. Just thinking loud here.
verdverm
Then you are selling them something different. These types of customers don't care what brand of tech you use
kvaranasi_
Correct they come into CSV -> analytics. They don't care if we use Postgres or Mongo.
verdverm
even analytics or dashboards are likely still too abstract

you are selling them reduced costs, or ideally more income, based on said analytics. Are they going to be able to make sense of the dashboards to make business decisions? I suspect this is where the gap is

Brick and mortar are more concerned with the day-to-day and prefer to outsource secondary operations they are not experts in. They are generally tech shy, so selling them a analytics solution is difficult

codingdave
Sure, but then you are stepping into the same arena as PowerBI and Tableau if you go that route. Definitely a valid use case, if you are ready to go up against large, well-established players. If you are going there, you'd really need to understand the market and have some solid differentiators -- "You can upload a CSV" won't be one.
verdverm
Dolt has this feature, but it is iffy and could be done better, inferring the schema is hard