datastation-documentation VS just-the-docs

Hey folks! I quit my job at Oracle almost a year ago now to build DataStation. It's an app I've wanted as an engineering manager for years now.

DataStation helps you query a variety of data sources (conventional SQL like PostgreSQL and MySQL, non-SQL like Prometheus or Elasticsearch), files and HTTP APIs. It is not a SQL layer on top of these various APIs like FDW in Postgres or Apache Calcite. For Prometheus you query with PromQL. For Elasticsearch you query with Lucene. And for SQL databases you query with their SQL dialect.

DataStation is made of panels (other apps might call them cells) that each produce a result. Panels can refer to other panels. These allow you to build workflows that cross the boundary of a particular datasource. For example you might have some data in a CSV a product manager gave you and the bulk of your data is in PostgreSQL. DataStation helps you pull together these data sets and script them.

DataStation is mainly a desktop app today where the end result is that you export graph SVGS or HTML tables or markdown tables or just a CSV file. All this data stays on your laptop so it's as easy to use in a corporate environment as any existing SQL IDE or Jupyter Notebook.

In the last year it's reached 1.5k stars on Github, over 1000 unique users and currently on-average about 40 fairly active users per month (defined as having opened the app more than a few times).

DataStation is primarily an Electron app but the code that evaluates panels is written in Go.

You can find a ton of tutorials on how to interact with supported databases on the DataStation website: https://datastation.multiprocess.io/docs/.

Looking forward to your feedback!

There are primarily a bunch of tutorials for getting started [0] (these are up to date) and some old videos (not up to date) [1].

[0] https://datastation.multiprocess.io/docs/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGOQFKonPUVo5LgxQDW26yg/vid...

A markdown generator embeds markdown from a Github repo into the marketing site. This way the marketing site is kept private while anyone can easily contribute to docs.

Docs are kept in separate folders for each release.

https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation-documentation

I think GitHub Pages only supports a whitelist of plugins, so you might have some more difficulties solving it well without any plugins. I use Netlify for my site, which does support arbitrary plugins.

One quick way to make it faster is to include that "_includes/nav.html" only in a nav.html, and then use an iframe to load that on every page, or something like that.

Anyway, I'm not the first to notice this it seems, although even "twice as fast" would still be quite slow: https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-docs/issues/1323

If it can help, there was a commenter earlier who suggested trying out a Doc-style github page that you can easily fork. It also has its own built-in search. Comment here. Github page here.

So the basic idea is I use the Jekyll site generator (which is already built into GitHub pages, but you can also install locally), and this is the theme I use: https://just-the-docs.github.io/just-the-docs/

That's certainly an option. Games like Liminal Horror and Into the Dungeon Revived host versions on GitHub. You can then render it to a GitHub.io page using something like Just the Docs.

The pages are written in markdown and the site has an in-built search feature. I am using the https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-docs jekyll theme.

The only people that like confluence have Stockholm syndrome. I'd argue that a wiki is the old people way of thinking. In most orgs a wiki is where data goes to die but some asshole keeps throwing data in there to appease some other asshole. I rather search slack, https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-docs, project boards in github, anything is better than confluence and I couldn't agree more that confluence search is the biggest piece of shit ever, it's worse than useless, it wastes your time.

https://pmarsceill.github.io/just-the-docs/

Especially if you're already familiar with Jekyll. Bonus points for being able to deploy on GitHub Pages!

You can use 'Just the Docs' (https://github.com/pmarsceill/just-the-docs) for documentation - it's a Jekyll-based theme for documentation and has built-in search.