The Open Source Databases Platform

The Open Source Databases Platform

When we started the Database HUB project on Back4App our vision was: What if people could build and sustain Databases together in the same way they do with code? What if they can benefit each other from work together to get more accurate and complete data to use on their App projects?
 
The journey hasn’t been easy. We’ve been working very hard based on user’s feedback to transform the HUB on a Social Platform to build and use Databases.
 
We’re happy to see how developers are Connecting to a ready Database in a few clicks and using it on their Apps.
 
Even happier to see the users publishing their own Databases, sharing their work and collaborating with each other to build Better Datasets useful to many other developers. You can see users opening issues here at the World Continents, Countries, and Cities, for example.

If you have any Dataset/Data Table you find useful and want to open to the community you can follow this Guide:

 
Additionally, if you want to invite friends, co-workers, classmates or complete strangers to collaborate on your project you can follow the steps below.

Why should I Open Source my Database?

1-It’s not an act of charity. Share your Database with other developers and the corresponding contribution process eventually result in better Data, more accurate, more complete, in summary in a higher return on the initial investment made versus the alternative to close your Database. John Nash has demonstrated that cooperating is not a zero-sum game and that by working together all participants may yield higher returns than the investment they make.

As a recent example, we have Published the World Continents, Continents and Cities Database. The Database started with a single String List of Continents, States, and Cities. Other people suggested to add Financial information(currency) other asked for Cities Geo Locations and the Database was becoming more and more complete.

DatabaseHUB is the best place to share data with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers.

2-Allow other people to not reinvent the wheel to use your work as a starting point to make it better. You might just want to share your work just to minimize the number of times the wheel needs to be reinvented.
Sometimes you develop some work that you won’t use it anymore but you can “throw it on the wall” to see what happens. Others will be free to use, improve, and adapt it. The result can surprise you.

3-If your Database Becomes a Standard you will have the benefit of a lot of people asking to contribute to your Database. This will accelerate innovation and new data tables/analysis and facilitate the emerge of new products more rapidly, built on top of your project.

4-When you make your Database Public you will start to interact with an external pool of very qualified contributors. As a side effect, it is possible to recruit from this pool having the benefit of already seen the work(contributions) made by the other developers.

5-If you are a Teacher/Instructor/Professor you can share complete projects with your students. They will be able to clone it and connect to the API and learn from your classes without the hassles of creating a complete backend environment to run databases, store files and run backend functions.


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