As a Roblox developer, it’s overly complicated for no good reason to see what data is actually in your datastore. We’re forced to overcomplicate simple checks to see if there aren’t duplicates, change data manually or to even see what is in the datastore in a more broad setting.
A solution that has been mentioned on the Forums before has been to use an external database and use some sort of graphical interface provided by a third-party. For most users, this will not work because, setting up a server for your database and ensuring the uptime can support a game is incredibly hard… also quite expensive. Datastores provide a costless (in terms of developers) way to store data and access it in-game. As a developer who’s broke, I don’t have the time to set up, create a web API and then, write some polling dark magic to a database on a machine that probably doesn’t scale which can pose a lot of issues when dealing with users and keeping the backend of the game… alive.
So far as of now, there’s no viable way to see data stored in a datastore without writing code to see it or using a plugin which can sometimes not provide what you’re looking for. Again, this makes testing or migration an absolute nightmare.
In short, it would be nice to have a interface that allows you to select a datastore that’s currently in your game (only accessible in studio). From there, it would populate a copy of the current entries given at that specific moment (assuming that new entries would populate the same so, it really wouldn’t matter). It would provide some cool options to edit and all that jazz.
If this is totally wrong, let me know. I dislike not knowing what is in my own datastore and only knowing of specific keys. It’s like tossing me into an ocean and not knowing if a shark is about to come after me. There’s a lot of potential in datastores being incredibly nice and I fully support datastores. It’s just lacking some features that would allow people to better utilize it.