I have yet to see another online service for viewing spreadsheets that works as seamlessly as the Socrata sets. It seems no matter how much data or how many rows there are - it is always consistently fast.
I'm curious to find out or learn some details as to why it works so well, or who/what is powering the sheets, and if possible, what kind of code/language or application allows it to work so much better than sites that host spreadsheet services.
Socrata actually isn't built on top of an existing spreadsheet application or platform. We've built our own platform using a number of different open source technologies.
Customer data is stored in our backend, where we use different datastores in a sharded configuration to make sure queries are performant while data remains highly available and safe. Long term storage in what we call our "truth stores" is managed by PostgreSQL while queries issued via our SODA API are dispatched to "secondaries" built on different technologies optimized for different query types. For example, a geospatial query might be sent to PostGIS while a free-text search would be sent to Lucene. Many of the components that make up our backend are open sourced on GitHub
Our front-end is built in Rails and AngularJS, and the data grid is a custom component built with JQuery.
