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I’m skeptical of the utility of building for non techie people. It takes literally tens of minutes to Learn SQL necessary to a single csv file; and the overlap

by eof 5y ago

I’m skeptical of the utility of building for non techie people. It takes literally tens of minutes to Learn SQL necessary to a single csv file; and the overlap of people needing to query csv files and capable of learning basic select syntax is probably nearly perfectly overlapping. I don’t knock the research at all, it’s very cool. But it has to be basically perfect for someone even slightly experienced to consider using, otherwise it will cause more frustration then time saving.

Closi 5y ago
> It takes literally tens of minutes to Learn SQL necessary to a single csv file It might take you, as a programmer or technically literate person, tens of minutes to learn the SQL necessary to parse a csv file. But I have met a whole raft of people that would firstly take much longer to learn enough SQL to get by, then would still need help when basic syntax error messages came up, and then would get frustrated before getting someone else to do basic analysis for them.
- eof 5y ago
  I have met those people to, but none of those people have ever had a csv file to run queries on. Analysis has a lot of meanings. Getting basic facts (there are N rows that X) and selecting subsets of data are realistic analysis non technical people might do on csv files. And I want to be clear that parsing a csv file with sqlite or MySQL is much more complex than learning “SELECT .. FROM .. WHERE” (with no joins!) when there is a tool like OPs that magically does the “parsing”.
  - Closi 5y ago
    In reality, a basic query might be something like "Show me how many units of product code 010201 were sold each month this year", which actually isn't that easy to write in SQL (but very easy to express in plain English).
  - wswope 5y ago
    > And I want to be clear that parsing a csv file with sqlite or MySQL is much more complex than learning “SELECT .. FROM .. WHERE” (with no joins!) when there is a tool like OPs that magically does the “parsing”. Sqlite CSV import: .mode csv .import file.csv tablename
Taurenking 5y ago

by eof 5y ago

Closi 5y ago

> It takes literally tens of minutes to Learn SQL necessary to a single csv file It might take you, as a programmer or technically literate person, tens of minutes to learn the SQL necessary to parse a csv file. But I have met a whole raft of people that would firstly take much longer to learn enough SQL to get by, then would still need help when basic syntax error messages came up, and then would get frustrated before getting someone else to do basic analysis for them.

eof 5y ago
I have met those people to, but none of those people have ever had a csv file to run queries on. Analysis has a lot of meanings. Getting basic facts (there are N rows that X) and selecting subsets of data are realistic analysis non technical people might do on csv files. And I want to be clear that parsing a csv file with sqlite or MySQL is much more complex than learning “SELECT .. FROM .. WHERE” (with no joins!) when there is a tool like OPs that magically does the “parsing”.
- Closi 5y ago
  In reality, a basic query might be something like "Show me how many units of product code 010201 were sold each month this year", which actually isn't that easy to write in SQL (but very easy to express in plain English).
- wswope 5y ago
  > And I want to be clear that parsing a csv file with sqlite or MySQL is much more complex than learning “SELECT .. FROM .. WHERE” (with no joins!) when there is a tool like OPs that magically does the “parsing”. Sqlite CSV import: .mode csv .import file.csv tablename

Taurenking 5y ago