this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025

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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 Bubs@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I would scrape them into individual json files with more info than you think you need, just for the sake of simplicity. Once you have them all, then you can work out an ideal storage solution, probably some kind of SQL DB. Once that is done, you could turn the json files into a .tar.zst and archive it, or just delete them if you are confident in processed representation.

Source: I completed a similar but much larger story site archive and found this to be the easiest way.

[–] Bubs@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

That's a good idea! Would yaml be alright for this too? I like the readability and Python styled syntax compared to json.

[–] canpolat@programming.dev 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I would stay away from YAML (almost at all costs).

[–] logging_strict@programming.dev 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Curious to hear your reasoning as to why yaml is less desirable? Would think the opposite.

Surprised me with your strong opinion.

Maybe if you would allow, and have a few shot glasses handy, could take a stab at changing your mind.

But first list all your reservations concerning yaml

Relevent packages I wrote that rely on yaml

pytest-logging-strict
sphinx-external-toc-strict

[–] Bubs@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What's your reasoning for that?

At this point, I think I'll only use yaml as the scraper output and then create a database tool to convert that into whatever data format I end up using.

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

JSON is a much simpler (and consequently safer) format. It's also more universally supported.

YAML (or TOML) is decent for a manually read and written configuration. But for a scraper output for storage and follow-up workflows being through code parsing anyway, I would go for JSON.

[–] Bubs@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

That's an interesting read. I'll definitely give json a try too.

[–] logging_strict@programming.dev 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Very wise idea. And if you want to up your game, can validate the yaml against a schema.

Check out strictyaml

The author is ahead of his time. Uses validated yaml to build stories and weave those into web sites.

Unfortunately the author also does the same with strictyaml tests. Can get frustrating cause the tests are too simple.

[–] Bubs@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago

Gonna be honest, I'll need to research a bit more what validating against a schema is, but I get the general idea, and I like it.

For initial testing and prototypes, I probably won't worry about validation, but once I get to the point of refining the system, validation like that would be a good idea.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I see no reason you can't use yaml.
Yaml and json are essentially identical for basic purposes.

Once the scraper has been confirmed working, are you going to be doing a lot of reading/editing of the raw data? It might as well be a binary blob (which is a bad idea as it couples the raw data to your specific implementation)

[–] Bubs@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago

I'm not entirely sure yet, but probably yes to both. The story text will likely stay unchanged, but I'll likely experiment with various ways to analyze the stories.

The main idea I want to try is assigning stories "likely tags" based on the frequency of keywords. So castle and sword could indicate fantasy while robot and ship could indicate sci-fi. There are a lot of stories missing tags, so something like this would be helpful.

[–] liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 days ago

Yup, I think it'd work fine, especially if you want the ability to easily inspect individual items.

Any of the popular python yaml libraries will be more than sufficient. With a bit of work, you can marshal the input (when reading files back) into python (data)classes, making it easy to work with.