I’m curious since I want to build a full ERP here.
How big your app can be?
Let’s formulate that differently
How many tables and average rows can you have on an app before it could start to affect performance significantly?
I have an AppSheet app with around 40-45 tables and the biggest table have a couple thousand rows while the other ones are in the 200 range, some less than that.
The thing is, to make Glide pricing more diggestable I would need to integrate other apps (10~ tables each one) into a big one.
This shouldn’t be a problem (if Glide is able to be a 1-1 remplacement first, obviously) but I’m concern about performance issues with 60-70 tables on my app.
Another interesting thing that I see is that as far as I know row owners is the only security filter available here that prevents the data to be sync to a certain device while I would need a lot of more flexibility there, considering different profiles for different users, even multi-company support on a single app…
My biggest app is about 120 tables. It’s roughly a 50/50 split between Google Sheets and Glide Tables.
The app is quite slow to load, but I believe that has nothing to do with the number of tables. Rather it’s more a function of the number of data rows (~30,000) and computed columns (~2000+)
Roles can be Row Owners, so that provides additional options, especially if you need multi-tenancy type functionality.
I was looking on the forum for “ERP” since I got the question from a potential customer if we could do something like that with no-code tools.
Let me explain:
The potential customer is a fast growing company (currently ± 70 people) making industrial sorting machines.
These are highly complex industrial machines that are more or less custom made for the end customers based upon a lot of components.
They are using the ERP from their previous sorting company which was developed >15 years ago using a mysql database and visual basic. The system is running on their own servers.
Everything runs on user input and outputs and the system works great, only the input and outputs are absolutely not up to current standards.
Would it be possible to build such a system on Glide, Google sheets or No-Code tools?
Do you have any example projects you can show in order to show the level of complexity&size you can achieve and what issues you would run into?
Or how would you advice to approach this?
What I meant is that all data gathered by the system is from manual User inputs (this should be doable in Glide)
The app output should be that it updates the “central database” from which multiple views can be generated.
It’s just that there are many parts and components in the system and many lines and I’m not sure if Glide would be able to handle the load & complexity.
So therefore I was asking if there were examples of people that built ERP systems or alike. Or if you would recommend to keep using MySQL or someting different as a core database and integrate Glide Apps through API’s.
How big is the current database?
If you’re talking about hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of records, then Glide is not the answer - at least not yet.
But if the existing system has an API that you can work with, then using Glide as an intermediary user interface might be an option.
The main problem with these cases (huge data) and Glide is the lack of client/server model and/or database pagination technique to manipulate this data. As you should know, Glide loads and puts entire data on your device and later, your APP works doing calculations, relations, etc. This is fine up to 20k-30k rows/registers but you need something smarter and more robust if your data is beyond the above limite.
I read through the other Topic about the limitations.
It seems we’ll have to wait on some upgrades on the Glide side.
Airtable doesn’t really seem like the solution here or am i wrong?
It also has a limit of 250k records.
It’s a tough limit I think since I see plenty of applications for Glide in let’s say inventory management.
However with some larger companies you quickly have well above 10k different assets.
These assets need to be inspected at least once a year, some even every 3months.
Then you have registrations which assets go to what location a few times per year.
They buy new equipment to replace the old, so the database grows even bigger.
I guess that in this situation after a year or so, the database will outgrow Glide and you’re stuck.
Basically you would need to have some external database that can handle this and that easily integrates with Glide (for no-coders) because we don’t want to hassle with database management.
Yeah, this also falls under the 25k database limit. We hope the new computation model can lift some restrictions, but I’m not sure when it will be deployed, and how much can it help row-wise.
Maybe you can try talking to Glide about the enterprise level to see if they can offer more rows. Personally I have never worked for a client on that level.