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2023-09-15 Disc Database

Mar 12, 2024, 3 min read

Why?

I’m a big fan of disc golf. My landing page all things disc golf: Disc Golf

Discs are obviously a big deal. You buy or find discs (with no name), lose discs (a lot), or get mesmerized by majestic tour stamped discs.

I usually try to keep my Disc Golf Gear List separate from by disc database.

I’m not into discs as much as others, even after being into disc golf for years. I am a software engineer, and with that my nerdi-ness of wanting to keep stats takes over.

So I keep track of all new and lost discs I accumulate so I can see counts / stats.

I’ve missed some here and there of course, not a perfect bookkeeper.

I’ve tried different ways to keep track of discs:

  • Excel file
  • Obsidian markdown
  • JSON file on GitHub
  • EventstoreDB
  • (Active) Postgres + Noco DB

Every time, every implementation, eventually, the DB stops getting updated because it’s not simple enough.

I want these qualities from a disc database:

  • Easy to update from desktop or mobile
  • Private edit
  • Easily shared / public viewable read-only
  • Structured data

So I’m using neon.tech Postgres + Noco DB . Noco is free/open source and gives me the structured data I want and a nice UI to edit it. Nowadays it seems to work on mobile. I can either host a view on my website or just query SQL and render it how I want so others can view it.

How?

Database I’m using https://neon.tech/ for free Postgres hosting. I don’t want to worry about backups or losing data.

My schema is one table. It could be normalized more but I don’t care:

create table noco.disc
(
    brand      text,
    color      text,
    model      text,
    plastic    text,
    number     bigint,
    status     text,
    weight     bigint,
    created    date,
    price      numeric,
    notes      text,
    aces       bigint,
    id         integer   default nextval('noco.discs_source_csv_id_seq'::regclass) not null
        constraint discs_source_csv_pkey
            primary key,
    created_at timestamp default now(),
    updated_at timestamp default now()
);

(Some of the columns are auto-generated by Noco but that’s a bit obvious)

Probably, the most important, column, is… number. It’s really nice to be over 100 now. Also, it’s nice to differentiate help similarly colored no stamp discs:

Editing I use Noco DB running from a docker compose file. I love how close this is to Airtable. I mean it is far from it, but I like the experience.

Noco DB is hosted via 2023-09-06 Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel Setup so I can edit/view from anywhere.

Viewing For now, Noco’s “views” will do the job. It’s just an iframe. Available here: https://loonison.com/discs

Another pro of using the view is you can download as CSV or XLSX. So others can take the same format if they want and I don’t have to write any UI or export API code 💪

To Dos

  • Show picture(s) of discs
  • Delete JSON file from /data folder on GitHub
  • Link this to blog index, link this to disc golf projects
  • link to architecture?

After Thoughts

I’ve been using this for a while, just thought I’d document it.

I’m mixing hosting locally and a cloud database, but I think this gives:

  • Free (besides power)
  • Data automatically backed up
  • Secure public access with Cloudflare
  • Minimal custom code

Along with this project, I want a similar flow to: 2023-09-16 New Project - Upload Udisc Scorecards and Populate Feed.

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