Cloud-based web database?

February 3, 2014 8:22 AM

I'm looking for a cloud-based database solution with a web front end. The idea is that you could upload an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file (or Access export), and then customize a front end query that will bring back results.

Use case: User enters their ZIP code and gets a list of businesses in the database that match that ZIP code (not geolocation). Or user enters a last name and gets phone numbers of everyone with that name.

Any ideas? Bonus if it does relational databases as well.

posted by adverb to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Some folks where I work have been experimenting with http://www.tableausoftware.com/. I don't have direct experience with it and the licenses seem to target enterprises so it may be too much but my impression is that it does all these things.
posted by cCranium at 9:14 AM on February 3, 2014

I'm not sure if you're asking for a service that does this, or for a platform on which you can build this. Could you clarify? If the latter, AWS is probably the place to start.
posted by The Michael The at 9:19 AM on February 3, 2014

Zoho Creator might do what you want.
posted by COD at 9:29 AM on February 3, 2014

If the latter, AWS is probably the place to start.

Disagree very strongly with this. The primary strength of AWS is auto-scaling. Small, one-off projects are better off on shared hosting, a cheap monthly VPS (Digial Ocean or Linode), or something like Heroku. This is especially true for folks who aren't already familiar with Amazon's voluminous glossary of terms or the AWS computing stack.

That said . . . Zoho Creator or maybe even just straight-up google docs is probably where you want to go if you're not looking to build it yourself.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:30 AM on February 3, 2014

Platform doesn't matter, since I'm assuming we'd be using an iframe to display this within our website (I know, not the best solution), and we wouldn't be doing any custom development. We currently run Drupal/MySQL.
posted by adverb at 10:00 AM on February 3, 2014

BigQuery?
posted by jillithd at 11:31 AM on February 3, 2014

I've also heard great things about Tableau. They also have a free version called Tableau Public.
posted by forkisbetter at 1:23 PM on February 3, 2014

Microsoft has Windows Azure that includes a cloud based DB. It would need some basic coding, but it could probably do what you want:
https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/sql-database/
posted by nalyd at 3:44 AM on February 4, 2014

For small one offs there is (as mentioned above) google docs spreadsheets. You can query them a little like a db (documentation).
posted by mce at 6:16 AM on February 4, 2014

If you're using Drupal currently, have you looked into the Feeds module or the Data module? Depending on your needs, one of those might work really well - they should both give you the ability to access your data with Views, which you can use to set up relationships.
posted by kristi at 9:44 AM on February 5, 2014