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Ask HN: Examples of Apps with Lots of Data

4 points by walesmd ↗ HN
Can any provide examples of web-based applications that return an outrageous amount of data to the user?

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).

4 comments

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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.

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