It’ll be interesting to see what developers can do with this as a service.

[ Google Opening BigTable as a Web Service ]

http://www.librarything.com/

Well, just recently, someone commented on the post that I should use librarything.com. I just went and checked it out and it’s quite awesome.

If you’re into reading and/or are anal enough to want to know exactly what books you own, you need to check it out:

http://www.librarything.com

Recently I’ve been running into a problem in the bookstore while browsing. I come across a title that looks intruiging and then realize that I’m not sure whether or not I already own it. It’s a horrible feeling, really. The old me says buy it anyway and give it away if it’s a duplicate, but the new me demands that I check first to see if I own it.

The obvious solution is to be able to check, from the bookstore, whether or not I actually already have a given book. So I made a list of my books in vi, sorted it for easy searching, and put it on the site.

Now, whenever I’m in doubt, I can conjure the page over my Blackberry and check to see if I have the damn thing before I buy it. :) W00t.

http://dmiessler.com/mybooks

Next I’ll complete my previous project of manually building a database to do this using LAMP. I did it already, but my table structure was primitive and the only functions I had were viewing all books and adding new books. What I’d ultimately like to be able to do is search by any field, e.g. author, edition, subject, etc.

Another thought I’ve been throwing around is the concept of tagging along the lines of Delicious. In other words, take each book and give it a series of tags. Then, just as with Delicious and Flikr, I could search for all books with a given tag (or even multiple tags). As an example, it’d be cool to call up all books of mine that have to do with database, or all my Python books, etc. Anyway, this’ll work for now.

In addition, one fellow geek (Stankdog from binrev) — someone far more versed in database than I am — thinks Postgres is definitely is a dramatically superior database overall. Another buddy of mine points out that the main reason MySQL got so big is because of blogging. Every major blogging package I know of is based on it. As a result, Postgres is little more to most people than, “that other open-source database”.

The upshot is that it may be time for us geeks to start thinking about Postgres as a lot more than the “other” option. An anonymous coward on /. summed it up well:

“Even those who trust MySQL and Trolltech must realize that their GPL + proprietary licensing schemes lead to future lock-in, and should be avoided for that reason alone. If you are a MySQL user, and you care about the future of Open Source, you should be looking at alternatives, such as PostgreSQL.”