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by alphanumeric0 1047 days ago
What's the benefit of this versus a time series database?
2 comments

I'm not sure how those are comparable.

The trick here is to take some source of information online that's updated frequently and turn that into a historic record of every change made to that source, by setting up a GitHub repository and dropping a YAML file into it setting up a scheduled action.

Achieving the same thing with a time series database would require a whole lot more work I think - you'd need to run that database somewhere, then run code that scrapes and writes to it on a scheduled basis.

If you already have a time series database running and a machine that runs cron I guess it wouldn't be too much work to put that in place.

Git scraping also lets you easily track changes made to textual content, which I don't think would fit neatly in a time series database.

I mean you could use SQLite the wrong way and use it as a time series database, which would save you from having to have a machine to host it, and I'm sure you could cobble together some sort of hosting for it and glue it to a web cron system. this github seems quite a bit more straightforwards, but then you're on git instead of something else.
Yes, maybe they are a bit 'apples to oranges'. You have some good points, especially when it comes to textual data. Thanks!
Tracking changes vs. tracking full versions of data is one immediate benefit (or difference, depending on your thoughts)