[latchkey]

I went through something like this. I was thinking oh... airtable saves me from having to develop the crud aspects of my app! Boy was I wrong.

For super super basic stuff, Airtable is fine to code against their API. But as soon as you get into anything more complicated, you are going to get screwed.

They have a 5 concurrent connection limit and no real transactions. Want to insert 6 rows quickly across two tables? Nope. I guarantee that despite all your best effort, you will have inconsistent data. At a high level, their api is nice and simple, but that is it. It doesn't go deeper than that.

You are VASTLY better off building against a real SQL database. If you want to visualize the data in Airtable, then export it there from your SQL database.

[travbrack]

From TFA:

> I wouldn't recommend using Airtable to store fast-moving data but as a means of storing strings, images, positions of views, and general data that won't get updated very often, Airtable could be a potential option for you.

[latchkey]

Certainly, I knew what I was getting into and my application actually fell under that category. But even storing glacier data is difficult if you can't store more than 5 things a second.

At the end of the day, I knowingly made the decision to experiment with it. I learned a bunch from it. Glad I did it.

[yesimahuman]

The way to use it in my experience is if you have a good data set that will be edited by non-engineers, periodically pull it into a more appropriate application database. Then you’re enabling others to manage the data but still get the performance and scalability the app needs. This will suit only certain kinds of apps, of course

[specialist]

I've always wondered why there's no HTTP tunneling for misc RDBMS protocols. For example, a MIME-Type for MS SQL Server Tabular Data Stream (TDS).