HarperDB Cloud: What Else Could I Ask For?!

It’s almost that time of the year where I randomly post a blog about something that excited me/caught my eye. And, this time, it’s HarperDB Cloud! What’s the new thing about it, you may think. As I mentioned in one of my blog post about 2 years ago (that you can literally see on the homepage.. pfft) that how much I appreciate someone Mixing NoSQL and SQL and giving something amazing.

I’ve enjoyed working with HarperDB and the idea of that level of flexibility over the last 2 years. But, it’s been a drag to set it up. Because:

I’ve been following HarperDB… hoping that they would integrate with AWS or Azure so that I can be lazier and use the DB without installing anything and setting things up manually. Well, earlier this year, HarperDB released their Cloud Platform (2020 isn’t that bad). It couldn’t have been better, because I don’t even have to log into AWS and spin up a process there and meddle with IAMs and stuff. HarperDB Cloud has everything in it. It’s literally a few clicks away to give me a cloud instance of HarperDB. And the best thing is that I don’t even have to set up anything extra. HarperDB team has made it so smooth, convenient and straightforward to work with HarperDB Cloud.

The first time I signed up and logged in, I didn’t have to read the documentation (I’ve still not read it and I’m not THAT proud of myself for it) and I just started setting up my organisation and started my first cloud instance in a few minutes and in a few clicks.

I’ll go through some of the features of HarperDB Cloud and will share some things I loved about it in this blog!

So, the very first thing after signing in you’ll see is your “organisation dashboard”. Organization can be summed up like a project (I’m sure HarperDB Team can explain that better). But, that’s what I take it as. So, every organisation will have it’s own resources and billing. If you’re running multiple projects or many different teams/clients, then this is how you can separate them out easily. You can monitor the resources separately, manage users separately and get the billing separately. Nifty, isn’t it?

Now, as soon as you select an organisation, you will be able to see all the instances belonging to that organisation. Also, I must say that I love the minimal user interface HarperDB Cloud has. I love looking at the important information I need to get on with my work and I do not like to search for the things I’d need on daily basis. This is the sole reason why I’ve preferred AWS rather than going for Azure. But, HarperDB Cloud has even more minimalistic look, and the things I need are right in front of me.

For example: I can see the instance name right on that screen. Also, I can see the status and the specifications of that instance from the organisation dashboard itself. I can also see the connection string from there itself. And if I want to delete the instance, there’s a delete icon on that board in top right and it’ll bring up the confirmation dialogue right away. I don’t have to navigate through multiple screens or wait for pages to load. Everything is just right there in front me… sitting so beautifully.

Creating an instance is really easy and quick as well. And guess what? It all happens in the same window. No need to navigate or loose your current screen.

They’ve got many configurations available and you can go through them on that instance detail page itself. It’s pretty much self explanatory to move around.

Now that you’ve got your instance up and running, you would want to see the instance, create tables, add data, make APIs etc. Let’s quickly see how that looks and you can see from the video (below) how easy it is.

We will be using APIs to work with data for the most part. But, the UI is super effective. Adding the records is super clean as well. We can insert an array of data to add in multiple records at the same time, or we can add a single row. Watch Video 1 for reference. Also, we can do field based searches, right from this grid itself (Video 2).

Now comes my favourite part. As you can see, the data I’ve entered and the schema, is all NoSQL based. So, we will have to work by iterating rowsets ourselves or use third party buggy and restrictive drivers or find some not so updated/abandoned mid-way library on Github. NOPE! You can easily run SQL queries in HarperDB. Yaaaaas! Check out this little video for this. As you can see, I was able to run the basic SELECT query and also, was able to run an UPDATE query on this data and you can see how fast it was done. Also, no more re-typing the commands for your SQL or pressing the up key. If you look down in bottom left, they’ve got Query History. Just click on the command you want to re-run and boom. You can edit that command as well, before executing. Check Video 3.

There are 2 other features HarperDB Cloud provides at the moment… Clustering and Adding Users. I’m not totally familiar with how clustering works, as I’ve not worked with it, yet. But, you can learn more about Clustering on HarperDB’s documentation.

Coming onto the USERS for the instance. You can totally do that via HarperDB Cloud’s website, or use the APIs that HarperDB provides. And it’s really powerful as well, because it’ll let you do the “Role Based Operation Restrictions” as well. Like, if you want to restrict users to certain things in your DB, like not being able to create a table, or a record etc. That’s how you would do it.

These are all the good things I came across. But, there could be certain things that need improvement or something little added here and there to make it even better, right? Nothing is perfect. While I was working, I did feel a few things could need some improvement.

• Documentation lacks detailed information on certain important topics like Clustering, Organisation.
• While running the SQL Queries from the UI Window, it’ll be good to have auto-suggestions for Schema and Table names.
• Searching in the field is a little annoying, because when you start typing, it’ll start searching. The complete grid is Not editable at this point. So, moving the search field option should be moved out of the search grid.
• When you’re searching and your search has no result, there’s a “reset” filter button in the middle of the grid. I felt that this stopped my flow. A warning message can be shown instead.

There are so many things to explore in HarperDB Cloud, which I’ve not done yet. You can to go over to their website and go through the documentation to know more. They’ve been working very hard and have brought so many new features in past 2 years and they’re coming up with even more. I’ve been using it for past 2 years on my personal little projects and been experimenting with it. Go ahead and check it out, it might be the thing you’ve been looking for, but didn’t know about 😉

Let the HarperDB Team know what you think about their product.