Datos (2015)

Datos was an experiment to bring the iPython notebook style of data analysis to the browser. It was created when I started to learn IndexedDB for the purpose of offline storage.

I created a library named idb.js that wraps the IndexedDB API and provides jQuery-like chaining through the use of Promises.

This project is hosted on GitHub.

Try it out

1. Go to https://sel-columbia.github.io/datos/
2. Remember to press SHIFT + ENTER to execute each code block

Lessons learned

• Use of the IndexedDB API requires deeply nested callbacks
• Wrapping it is the way to go, especially if you want to maintain readability and ease of use
• It has many strange bugs
• You can bulk load large CSVs (it’s a hidden feature) with thousands of rows and analyze them fairly quickly
• It’s annoying how native Javascript Promises require an extra level of nesting
• Web workers are the way to go when working with a lot of data