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Comment by thrtythreeforty | Hacker News Reader

Airtable really ought to be killing Excel, but the SaaS model combined with a stupidly low artificial row count limit (over 50000 rows is listed as "contact us for pricing") means that it will never achieve penetration into weird and wonderful use cases like Excel has.

Like, my default is to throw a dataset I'm hacking on into an SQL database so I can actually query the thing. But no I don't want to upload my 400MB log file. I'll just use grep, or build a CSV and deal with Excel filtering.

Airtable should be awesome at reducing the cost of database-ifying these random datasets to zero. But the sales constraints put it in this niche where it's not the default tool of choice.

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You might want to try out Baserow (https://baserow.io). It’s an open source alternative to Airtable, backed by a PostgreSQL database. Main differences are that you can self host it with unlimited rows, it’s modular and it’s made to handle high volumes of data.

Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Baserow.

Baserow is frickin awesome and I wish y'all the best.

100%

I found what Airtable is doing to be deeply attractive. But their costs and their lock in and their pricing model and it's just...

UGH.

Microsoft Access was a good idea with a terrible implementation.

There HAS to be a unfilled niche here.

nocodb looks to be the best answer so far? Because it ties to a backend postgres database, it can be used along side bespoke applications. It still needs development though. I'm watching it like a hawk.

VC-funded SaaS wiped out any real possibility of a sane business model for a product in this space.

We are trying to answer this with CloudTables (https://cloudtables.com) - which is effectively a GUI for my DataTables library with a Postgres backend. Current work is to address the row limit and allow millions of rows without needing to contact "sales" (me), while also not charging per user (I hate that as a customer). If anyone fancies giving it a go and dropping me some feedback that would be most welcome! There are some rough edges without question that are still being worked on, but I think it has some advantages such as being able to self host with your own Postgres instance.

I just want to say thanks for DataTables - it's a fantastic library!

This is off-topic, but I wanted to say a big Thank you for DataTables. I used it on many a project and still rave about how fully functional it is.

Access wasn’t even that bad of an implementation. It was amazing not just how broadly access was used but the kinds of users who could do real things with it. A bit like HyperCard.

Access lacks, IMO, better internal programming and more exposure to the fact that you can use pretty much any database you can access (pun intended) with ODBC or ADO.

Make it easily deliverable over network, and you have killer product.

Access was pretty incredible for what it is/was. I could build a structured database with a nice UI for non-data people, reports, and even more advanced things like automated emails, exports, etc., in 1/10th or even 1/20th the time it'd take to build something similar as a web app.

We had an Access database that managed grant funding for an entire public University and in many ways it worked a lot better than the SaaS app that recently replaced it. Need to collect a new set of data? No problem, give me 4 hours and it'll be ready to use :P.

I'd love to have something like Access but that worked very well as a platform-agnostic web app and could easily integrate with cloud infrastructure.

You used to be able to do that with Access 2010 web databases. Of course, Microsoft has deprecated that in favor of Powerapps and Microsoft Dataverse, but it's not clear that actually lets you join an Access database to a low-code frontend. (It should, but there's a lot of marketing speak that I don't quite understand.)

I also think it’s just kinda clunky compared to excel or Google sheets. Maybe if you get used to it it’s ok to work with, but I guess you run into the issue that any friction makes it a hard sell to those who are used to excel.

I am currently working on a CLI that will allow you to query .csv, .xls and .tsv files and SQL tables via plain English.

Interesting concept - care to explain in more detail?

I too would like to subscribe to this newsletter.

What do you mean by plain English? Will it support colloquialisms? Regional dialects? How is a Left Join expressed in English, distinct from a Full Join? Will it accept synonyms and contractions? Or will the Query Language require Structure?

Yeah their monetization strategy is extremely puzzling. As a casual user I loved their Chrome extension that lets me grab data and put it into a sheet in a click but it only lasted as long as my Pro membership. All of the advanced features seem to be locked behind a subscription.

Wonder how much the lack of pirating or using a friends out of date version prevents ubiquity.

apparently grist can handle 100,000 rows, and that's just a soft limit so you might be able to do more.

being able to have an excel grid and a chart view on the same page would probably suit your use case as well. being able to use python for the formulas is a nice touch too.

the free hosted version has almost all features available as far as i remember. there's also a docker version that's easy to get up and running and doesn't have any limitations

Also Grist isn't limited to the grid visual model https://twitter.com/dsagal0/status/1509924813837635593 (disclaimer1: grist employee) (disclaimer2: April 1)

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