It would be awesome if Guide would allow Airtable data source to be synced by “VIEW”. This should speed up the apps/pages along with Glide’s data editor as you can limit the data (rows/records & columns) being synced.
Example - I am on the Airtable PRO plan and have a base that has several thousand rows/records (~25k) and hundreds of colums (~250). Most of the colums are computed for internal use and really not needed for our front end. If could limit the amount of rows/records synced to Glide (~3,000) and colums (~25), correct me if I am wrong, it would make my apps/pages perform better.
Maybe I am overlooking something on why it won’t work?
I just started using Glide (Pro plan), playing with my current bases and testing the limits, but I keep getting the “Oh Sheet!” error on the Pages Builder. I understand my base is probably more complex than it really should/needs be and I can do some trimming, but would be nice to limit data synced to Gide vs modifing my entire base
In Airtable a view is a filtered version of the data (all the data is still there, but some of it is filtered out of view). However, with the Airtable API you can specify to retrieve ONLY the data in a specific a specific view (rows/ aka:records AND columns) and not loading the entire base.
For this, could you creat a new Airtable table, and then fill it with only the records you want in it for Glide using some sort of logic to avoid having it filled with the wrong/unwanted records?
This is almost critical. Allowing records from a view would allow for only a partial amount of records to feed. For example, you can filter an airtable view to only show active files or orders and only those records would be sent over. Airtable would still retain all the closed files, or old files, etc.
A workaround is to create a brand new Airtable base - then add a table in that new base which is a sync’d view using the view from the original table you need.
If you need to add records, you will need a separate sync set up back to the original base as you can not add records to a sync’d base (yet)
This is quite important for technical reasons. The view is more than just a filter, it’s a view, which is a database thing. It’s pre-populated with the data with the right filters, groupings, order, filters, etc. so that it doesn’t have to be calculated at runtime. This would make it not only much faster to make the Glide apps based off of the logic already thought through in the Airtable design/schema, but also make the app load and run faster.
If you are on the business plan, you could set a two-way sync between Airtable and an SQL database like Supabase and then use Supabase as your data source in Glide. More expensive but little/no record limitations and better performance in Glide.
I haven’t tried this yet, but the syncing between Supabase and Airtable works well. It’s pretty much real time.
