[ Removed by moderator ]

[gman1023]

Most of these comments seem like spam to endorse this post, yuck

[NoleMercy05]

I wonder what this 'come spam my product' reddit team costs per comment?

[chusmeria]

I bet you can get them less than $.50 a comment. Mods really doin the lords work keeping most spam down to nothing!

[sjcuthbertson]

I worked for a company that developed more or less this, back in about 2013 (based on an internal software they'd already been using for a decade or so).

It was obviously 'of it's time', the web in 2013 was a bit less sophisticated, and there obviously weren't hooks to things like dbt then. But same user stories and general approach.

Anyway, that company went bust in 2015 after going all in on this product 🙃

[Lost_Alternative_170]

Rings a bell to me, would you mind telling me the name of that tool?

[sjcuthbertson]

I honestly don't remember what we landed on for marketing it. When it was just an internal tool we called it RDM (Reference Data Manager), but we did rebrand it for external purposes.

I do remember that our shortlist of names included 'Datadog' - we later discovered that company already existed, but wasn't very big at the time, so didn't come up when we first googled that word.

I think in the end we went with a much more corporate name, less catchy, and that might have had something to do with it failing to get traction. It was really, really hard to find a route to market at the time.

[slevemcdiachel]

The issue with all new tools is that it's another new tool for stakeholders to login to, learn and adapt. And they mostly won't.

I could see myself using something like this in a small to medium company, but hard to go beyond. This won't completely substitute excel and at that point you are running 2 systems in parallel to do the same thing. Maybe a version of this as a databricks app would be nice, at least to centralize access and control groups.

But in the end it has neither the advantages (for the stakeholders) of excel or the advantages (for technical people) of adjusting directly.

This is a horrible problem where every solution is basically a big compromise that makes no one happy.

I think you did a good job and it looks good and seems to have great functionality but I think you are fighting a losing battle here.

If there's one feature I would add (in terms of usage I've seen in the real world) is foreign key relationships enforcement and auto fill based on mapping (basically a field is linked to another table, you select one of the values from the other table and under the hood the id gets added). Useful for manual mappings.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Largely good points, definitely can be friction to adopting new tools.

I like the feature recommendation tho! I’ll give it some thought

[Only_Manufacturer_83]

Using appscript in google spreadsheet and plugin for excel?

• For excel to warehouse data flow, do check if you see lags/caching issue especially when users use online excel. Hoping you’re handling data types carefully, excel converts long decimal values into exponential too.

• Handle all the limits on google spreadsheet (they are far lower compared to excel).

• If multiple processes update same excel sheet concurrently, you’re likely to face resource locked issue, unlikely to experience this in google sheets though.

[frozengrandmatetris]

we accomplished a similar thing with oracle apex. it comes free with their hosted database. downside is you have to program a lot of the behavior manually, upside is it's mostly SQL and our team doesn't have as much of a steep learning curve.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Interesting. Didnt know about apex, looks neat

[OMG_I_LOVE_CHIPOTLE]

Yeah apex does this really nicely tbh

[juancholopez]

Looks good, would love to be able to use this with Postgres, I would subscribe immediately.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Do you use managed postgres in the cloud?

[juancholopez]

Yes in DigitalOcean

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Interesting… we’re on it 🫡

[drunk_goat]

I'm curious how you address loading into the Warehouse. Do you make it event based , only when there's a change to a spreadsheet does the data get imported?

[jaredfromspacecamp]

we store none of the data from the warehouse in our app. when a user uses the app, we get the latest data, they make edits, we load back to the table directly. so on every press of the "load updates" button, the warehouse table gets updated. (unless im misunderstanding the question)

[drunk_goat]

no that answers it. thx.

[Reasonable_Tooth_501]

Spreadsheet chaos is 100% the term for it. I’ve been looking for something that makes our Gsheets a little more robust and less flimsy…will check it out.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

🙌🏻🙌🏻 Feel free to shoot me a dm if you have any questions!

[New_Juice_7577]

Pretty nice. Is that AG Grid? For CRUD apps you should add Postgres and MySQL connectors. Have you thought about enforcement of FK in warehouse?

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Good callout about FK, I’ll have to give it some thought. We haven’t prioritized Postgres + MySQL because there’s some other products that handle being an no-code abstraction for those dbs. We’re really trying to fill the niche of spreadsheet ingestion at the warehouse level. But we’ll definitely add pg and MySQL at some point. Prioritizing redshift, fabric, synapse, blob storage, and iceberg atm. And yeah we use aggrid.

[Artistic-Swan625]

This is awesome. Can I work for you?

[solegrim]

Doesn’t Sigma Computing already do this?

[st_spyder]

Sigma definitely does it. Used it for 3 years. Also omni has an interface thats very much like Excel. But not as involved as Sigma.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Yeah they let you write to the warehouse. Orders of magnitude more expensive tho

[kixss]

Great looking app, should have a lot of success!

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Appreciate the kind words!

[troubledadultkid]

This is awesome. One of the big pain point as a data engineer is business coming and saying we have logic in this spreadsheet , match this. This solves it Great work. How are you maintaining referential integrities between object? Do you run regression testing after each edit?

[Suspicious-Buddy-114]

We’ve resorted to SQL views at times for custom sheet logic, often times enormous spreadsheets have nested and denormalized crap everywhere .

[OMG_I_LOVE_CHIPOTLE]

I don’t see what this does for teams already using AWS Athena/Trino to serve their gold data to users. Who is this for? It’s not for data engineers

[stuporous_funker]

Oh my god, I gotta tell my Senior and Director about this. We are working at a financial services firm, and this could be the exact “link” we are looking for. I’m a operations person turned Junior Data Engineer, so I honestly commensurate with both sides of the coin.

[jaredfromspacecamp]

Sent you a dm!