Introducing the Airtable Integration

How will performance change when using an air table? Does the current limit of 25,000 rows remain?

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Hi @JackVaughan Hi @Mark

This integration it’s a giant step but…

I’m upset about not including Airtable linked fields management and multi attachment rendering & edition.

I think this is a mistake as probably Airtable actual users won’t find Glide is offering a true solution to adopt it as the perfect front end for their data.

In my case I won’t be able to do it without a complete data & edition integration.

Hope it will arrive in the near future.

:smiling_face_with_tear:

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I’m incredibly excited about this. :raised_hands:

Yes, it’s still a limited integration as @darder mentioned, but I can already see a lot of use cases if you use some workarounds for adding linked records. Here’s an example.

I look forward to seeing the integration develop!

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Hola,

May you explain a little more your claim to those who don’t handle very well Airtable yet?

Gracias!

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Sure

I’m really excited about this integration and waiting for the full support of Airtable features will arrive very soon.

This are the things I’m missing:

Airtable has native relations called links so you wouldn’t need to establish relations in Glide. Glide is now able to “read” and render this related fields as collections but it is still not possible to edit linked fields.

Airtable also support to add multiple attachments to a “documents” field, for example pictures or pdfs. Glide allow you to render this multi attachment field at least in Apps (not in Pages) and the images or pdfs are showed as a carrousel. The problem again is that Glide still doesn’t support to edit this kind of fields.

Workarounds are possible but that means to use Airtable in the same way you use standard sheets. Native Airtable capacities would be wasted.

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Happy to hear that it’s now in full production use ! :sunglasses:

@JackVaughan what software do you use for your amaziiiiiiing videos on YouTube ? Thanks !

I can’t imagine it will improve performance in any way. It just opens up another source of data for the app. Glide still keeps a duplicate copy of the data, regardless if it’s google sheets, airtable, or excel. There’s still a copy of the data on the glide servers that needs to synchronize between the glide servers and those outside services. This is before the app even gets involved.

The app itself is only communicating with the glide servers and the copy of the data stored within glide. The end user app has no awareness that any data was sourced from any outside service.

Performance and row limits are based more so on the sheer amount of data that you are sending and synchronizing between glide and the end user’s device. Plus consider that the end user’s device also keeps a local copy of the database and performs all of the computations, so all of that has to be cached and computed locally. For that reason, the 25k row limit isn’t dictated by type of the original source of data. It’s dictated by the amount of data that has to be sent, received, stored, and computed between the outside source (ex. AirTable) and glide, and between glide and each and every end user.

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Amazing job Glide Team as always!

Now we can use Airtable as a source of data into Glide.
What are good or possible ways of exporting data out of Glide?
We process orders in Glide and hence not only customize but also add Data Columns in Glide.
I assume to synchronize with Airtable, I would have to create fields in Airtable instead of a column in Glide every time I want to add a column in Glide.

But if I wanted to take my data elsewhere after Glide, to analyze it or store it
any suggestions?

I have a lot of computed columns that slow a lot my app.
If I use Glide Tables, how can I look for a row to make an automation? Normally I use zapier with sheets?

Here are a few options that leverage the Glide API

If you want to search for a row, then it’s only available on the enterprise level.

Otherwise, the other interactions are “add row” and “set column”. Theoretically you can still manipulate rows without a user interaction in the app, as long as you have the rowID.

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It´s great to have airtable as data base but there still are some performance issues.

I´ve notice that rows in glide tend to suddelndly dissappear while connected to airtable. This represents a problem in all tables but specially in the users table because the user suddendly is deleted and eventhoung it reappears after a few seconds, it provides a bad UX. It also prvents the use of choice fields as filters for lists , worsening the UI.

Have anyoone had this problem too? If so, how did you solve it?

Thank you.

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I have the same problem.
I gave up to use synced data from Airtable at the moment.

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I’ve noticed this to, with favourites being enabled. It’s not very performant, where if a user favourites a record, the record will disappear in Glide and reappear in about ~10 seconds. No solution as far as I can tell :frowning:

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Yep, realized that after setting it up. It does not support linked records.
Wonder how long that will take?
Can I check @JackVaughan ?

Context to the problem I am facing

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Any update on supporting linked records? (natively, without workarounds)

cc @JackVaughan

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The latest video (Make a Photo Uploader with Airtable - YouTube) shows you adding email address as the unique identifier, but anyone who uses airtable seriously is linking records and using the record id as the unique identifier.

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@Jesus_Gazca @moonki @saphier did you find a solution to disappearing data?

I’m also forced to give up on the idea of making this work, wrote about it here.

Hi! Any update on the ability to setup linked records values from Glide?
This is really must needed as workaround involve way too much logic :pray: