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Show HN: SchemafreeSQL – Data, Fluid as Code
Hi HN, I'm Dean, the non-technical co-founder of SchemafreeSQL. We released our beta version about a year ago. You can see the HN Post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30291592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30291592
Today I am pleased to announce our initial release of our hosted SFSQL offering.
A major concern from the HN Beta feedback we received was our longevity. Being a hosted database solution I can see why. We took that to heart and re-engineered our offering. We de-risked it by minimizing the amount of infrastructure under our management, fly.io manages customer's dedicated SFSQL endpoints, Aiven.io manages customer's dedicated databases across 5 clouds, our serverless offering is a managed AWS Aurora Serverless cluster, our in-house databases is managed by Planetscale.com, and Stripe handles subscriptions. The cost of these services are mostly on demand, bringing our monthly fixed cost to a very manageable level.
I highly recommend all these services.
We are boot strapping SFSQL for now. Our business model, how we make money, is simple. Our prices are higher than our costs. Just like all businesses, margins matter and because we incur the costs of these service and pass them on, our margins take a hit. We envision being more of an add-on to these service providers and others like them eventually. Our margins would increase and the total cost to our customers would decrease. In this model our pricing is purely value based.
"Data, Fluid as Code" is what we settled on after countless iterations. I believe it captures the "why" question, "why did we build this". SFSQL originally started out as an Object store for a online dev. environment we built in 2000. It has evolved over time. Its schemaless properties where added as we had a need to better handle user provided data structures and refactoring associated with many of our client projects.
Eric, the technical co-founder and creator of SFSQL, answered the "How" question in our HN beta post. For more in depth info on what's going on behind the scenes Eric is available via email support@schemafreesql.com, he is not available to respond here.
The demo apps were all built by me. Eric would like it known that he is not responsible for those codes bases, which are all available on GitHub. I built these apps while testing out SFSQL and seeing if we play nice with the various serverless platforms. Client solutions we have built with SFSQL are not available for public display so we went with these demo apps I built. The apps show how easy it is to hook up a back-end to a web app with SFSQL even by a non programmer like myself.
I hope you check out SFSQL. Try it for free, no sign-up required, and please leave us feedback https://schemafreesql.com/givefeedback_HN.html https://schemafreesql.com/givefeedback_HN.html
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- ano88888 4y agoYou can sense the dynamics or tension between Eric(their techinical co-founder) and Dean,OP. There seems to be a very distinct separation like Eric will not answer questions on HN and Eric wants Dean to point out demo apps are not created by him (either it is credit issue or perceived lower quality issue). There is no we or us. When there is a strong trust or good team dynamics, there is no such strong indiviudal characteristics
- dfragnito 4y agoEric and I have been together since 1997 solving problems with this thing called the Internet. Dynamics yes you can call it that. The comment was tongue and cheek about the code. Eric was unavailable to respond to comments in a timely manner so I let be known. Read into it as you want.
- morph123 4y agoWhy do people hate schemas so much? It is as silly as hating types in programming languages. It helps you to avoid doing stupid stuff.
- kw123 4y agoI have exactly the same feeling. Schema vs schemaless is like static typed vs dynamic language. The extreme is java vs JavaScript. With JavaScript, you have all freedom to construct objects with whatever properties, then you pay with hard-to-detect runtime errors. That is why people are going for TypeScript nowadays. I have learned this hard way, as I had hated Java so much sometime ago. For that I used quite bit Groovy, but later I had to refactor some with Java just for static typing, to avoid running time problems in critical area.
- mgkimsal 4y agoI've been in PHP for a long time, and over the last 8-10 years there's been a push for more typing in the language, and we have a lot more typing ceremony than earlier PHP. The nice aspect is that you can get away without it, at least for a while, and add in later. By later I'm usually meaning minutes or hours, not months. :) Biggest example I can provide right now is writing a class method - I don't have to put a return type on a method (indeed, you couldn't in earlier PHP!). When I'm first writing a method, I don't always necessarily know how I might use it. I can write up something basic, then decide after testing/experimenting that I want the return type to be a float, not an integer. Did this in Groovy as well for a few years - not being required to declare a bunch of stuff up front let me focus on the internals/logic a bit more first. Once that was working, putting more explicit types in (return types, parameter types, etc) would help 'freeze' it in place.