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YAML, SQL, or something else? Looking for recommendations for making a database of stories. (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Short version of the situation is that I have an old site I frequent for user written stories. The site is ancient (think early 2000's), and has terrible tools for sorting and searching the stories. Half of the time, stories disappear from author profiles. Thousands of stories and you can only sort by top, new, and 30-day top.

I'm in the process of programming a scraper tool so I can archive the stories and give myself a library to better find forgotten stories on the site. I'll be storing tags, dates, authors, etc, as well as the full body of the text.

Concerning the data, there are a few thousand stories- ascii only, and various data points for each story with the body of many stores reaching several pages long.

Currently, I'm using Python to compile the data and would like to know what storage solution is ideal for my situation. I have a little familiarity with SQL, json, and yaml, but not enough to know what might be best. I am also open to any other solutions that work well with Python.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I do a lot of web services and I'm a big fan of SQL, but I wouldn't use a SQL database for this myself. Something like MongoDb or Cassandra would probably serve you better (depending on whether you prefer a REST interface to your data or something more conventional). You've got a very flat structure except for tags.

Tags are the one feature that might make me choose SQL due to the many: many relationship.

I'm not sure what role you think YAML would play. You could store each story as YAML, but then you'd have to parse basically everything to filter and sort. The story should just be a massive text field, and the metadata goes into respective fields. Tags might be comma delimited or in SQL you could normalize it so that you have three tables: stories, tags, and a table that basically looks like

StoryId	TagId

I'd at least first try to use a non-relational database structure because filtering and sorting by tag might still be fast enough. If it's too slow then you could go SQL, but I'd aim for the less complex solution.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

A few keywords in there I'll have to look up, but I get the majority of it.

Yeah, I'm not too sure yet how complex the tags will be in the end. They are basically genres at the start, but I may make them more complex as I go.

After reading some of the other comments, I doubt I'll use yaml as the main storage method. I do like the idea of using yaml for the scraper output though. Would give me a nice way to organize the data elements for each story in a way that can be easily read when needed.