Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whoisjuan 2240 days ago
I already use Airtable as a backend for some small internal tools. It definitely does the job but there are some moments where I feel it might be easier and more flexible just to create something on Firebase. From an API perspective storing and retrieving objects in both is equally as easy.

The only reason I went with Airtable is because I needed a GUI to add data manually.
4 comments
ElFitz 2239 days ago
Perhaps you should look into Forest Admin? (for the GUI) They have a free open-source tool.

Never got to use it because I'm mainly running on DynamoDB, but heard lots of good things about it

link
whoisjuan 2239 days ago
I didn't know about this tool. Looks pretty nice. Thanks for sharing.

P.S: Saving a Google search for people who come across this thread: https://www.forestadmin.com/

link
kine 2240 days ago
100%. I love Firebase's speed but digging into the data and modifying it through their console is a total pain.
link
ElFitz 2239 days ago
Their console is a pain, and some of other aspects too.

Remember getting an error because a document was getting updated too fast (four or five times in less than a second).

Heck, their own documentation states a document can only be updated about once (1) per second[0]

[0]: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/counter...

link
lima 2240 days ago
Currently migrating a data-heavy Firebase project to plain boring Django. We didn't need the realtime and offline features of Firebase and it's a massive pain to work with.

A regular SQL database and a good ORM is so much more productive. Servers have terabytes of RAM these days.

link
nicoburns 2240 days ago
We're in the middle of a similar transition, except that we were using the realtime features of firebase (but we needed better querying).

We've found that Hasura offers us the best of both worlds. It doesn't actually store any data itself, it's "just" an API layer on top of postgres. So we can do most things with bog-standard SQL-backed REST APIs, and with a couple of clicks to set up relations and permissions in Hasura we also access any of that same data through realtime-capable GraphQL api.

link
tschellenbach 2240 days ago
Django + DRF is pretty amazing in terms of productivity
link
kyawzazaw 2240 days ago
Was using Firebase for a small project to store non-relational Data. Switching to JSON was much more easier.
link
pezo1919 2240 days ago
What does Airtable give you over gsheets for you? I use gsheets but I am interested.
link