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Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase

(github.com)
200 points dcu | 2 comments | 03 Jul 25 15:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.572s | source
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CharlesW ◴[03 Jul 25 17:03 UTC] No.44457094[source]▶
Pocketbase is already the poor man's BaaS, and is minimalist compared to the two others mentioned.

> Data stored in human-readable CSVs

The choice to not use a database when two near-perfect tiny candidates exist, and furthermore to choose the notorious CSV format for storing data, is absolutely mystifying. One can use their Wasm builds if platform-specific binaries offend.

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loeber ◴[03 Jul 25 17:58 UTC] No.44457602[source]▶
In 2025, pretending that a CSV can be a reasonable alternative to a database because it is "smaller" is just wild. Totally unconscionable.
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1. nullishdomain ◴[03 Jul 25 19:03 UTC] No.44458193[source]▶
Not so sure about this. At scale, sure, but how many apps are out there that perform basic CRUD for a few thousand records max and don't need the various benefits and guarantees a DB provides?
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2. makeitdouble ◴[04 Jul 25 03:00 UTC] No.44460789[source]▶
I assume parent's dispair is about CSV's amount of traps and parsing quirks.

I'd also be hard pressed to find any real reason to chose CSV over JSONL for instance. Parsing is fast and utterly standard, it's predictible and if your data is really simple JSONL files will be super simple.

At it's simplest, the difference between a CSV line and a JSON array is 4 characters.