I need a simple, light database to accumulate some data from a JSON feed. Ideas?
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I have a little personal project I'm working on. I know what I want to do, but I'm not really sure how to accomplish it.
I have a JSON feed that hands out song names and artists, and I'd like to compile them into a database so I can keep track of 1. all songs that were played and 2. how often each song was played in a particular time period. My experience with databases, however, boils down to installing some MySQL-based web apps and using Access in high school.
Are there any nice, light programs I can use? Perhaps a scripting language like Python or Ruby (I'd have to teach myself) with some sort of database plug-in? I've heard of SQLite and the concept sounds about right, but I don't know SQL and I don't know how I'd interface between the database and the JSON data.
I was attempting to use Yahoo Pipes until I realized the whole point of Pipes is to [b]create[/b] a JSON-like feed of data, which I already have.
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CouchDB comes to mind. It's a NoSQL Document DB like MongoDB, but especially designed for JSON-structured data and accessible via HTTP. (Apparently there is also a free cloud service for personal projects) It should be sufficient for your use case though it has some catches for more sophisticated data models. (read: anything that requires a join)
Or, of course, you could just learn SQL. For your project, you should be fine with some basic SELECT and UPDATE queries and it'll probably be worth the investment in the future.
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I've played a little bit with MongoDB, which is ideal for this purpose because it "speaks" JSON for everything. (Not just data feeds, but sprocs and such.)
Learning curve is steep though.
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Hi,
maybe it's not so widespread but Ojota (http://ojota.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) it's a nice json based database that works either with the filesystem or a feed coming from the net. The code is also easy to understand.
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@evilspoons said:
I have a little personal project I'm working on. I know what I want to do, but I'm not really sure how to accomplish it.
I have a JSON feed that hands out song names and artists, and I'd like to compile them into a database so I can keep track of 1. all songs that were played and 2. how often each song was played in a particular time period. My experience with databases, however, boils down to installing some MySQL-based web apps and using Access in high school.
Are there any nice, light programs I can use? Perhaps a scripting language like Python or Ruby (I'd have to teach myself) with some sort of database plug-in? I've heard of SQLite and the concept sounds about right, but I don't know SQL and I don't know how I'd interface between the database and the JSON data.
I was attempting to use Yahoo Pipes until I realized the whole point of Pipes is to create a JSON-like feed of data, which I already have.
Unless you're wiling to learn not just SQL but systems programming as well, I'd stay away from Sqlite. It's a great project in many ways, but it's not very noob-friendly. Personally, I gravitate toward Postgresql for most new development. The SQL you'll have to write ought to be pretty minimal.
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Well, I decided to axe the 'simple, light' requirement and I just went ahead and installed a full LAMP stack in a virtual machine. I've started diving in with MySQL, and I must say that it's not quite as hard as I thought it was.
I've managed to achieve my goal of downloading the JSON feed and inserting the data into a couple tables, and I'm starting to learn how to manipulate the data in such a way that I can get the results out of it that I was interested in finding.
I think the biggest advantage of changing from "something light" to a full blown Apache/MySQL/PHP installation is just the quantity of documentation and tutorials available for everything.
Thanks for the suggestions anyway, though!
