I have an app with Airtable as the backend and about 30,000 records at this point, growing quickly. The app gets slower and slower every day because of this. I think I’ve read or I’ve been told by someone at Glide to use a combination of Airtable and Big Tables to improve speed. I know using Glide Tables / Big Tables exclusively would increase speed, get rid of sync delay, etc., but I literally can’t imagine losing Airtable and all that we do there. So, I’m trying to think of a way to use Airtable only for the records that we and our clients are actively working on and then storing all past records in a Big Table once those records have been completed. Does anyone have success in this approach? Is it worth it? I tried to export/import all the records from Airtable to a Big Table, but I really need the attachments from Airtable to go into the Big Table, and that process did not work for that. Anyone have a solution for this besides doing it through Make.com and using like 1M operations?
What would you do with the archived records in Big Tables though? Would you use them anywhere inside your app?
They would just be for users to view past records. They wouldn’t need to be edited really or anything like that. Just need to be able to search through them and filter by certain columns. I know how I’ll display them / use them once they’re in a Big Table. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to get them from Airtable to Big Table with the attachments. Once I make the first transfer of 26,000 records, I think I know what to do for future records
Can Airtable export the attachments as URLs?
If yes, you should be able to import them directly via CSV.
If there are multiple attachments per row, then it gets a little more complicated. Still possible, I think, but you’d have to use the Glide API.
It is formatted like this when it exports:
lvcbImNqgiCPs2ospFvb.pdf (Sign in - Airtable)
Looks like it won’t display the link I tried to share. But basically in the same cell, it has that pdf name and then in parentheses it has the Airtable expiring url link. It’s looking like I’m going to have to use Glide API, which isn’t the end of the world
To update everyone with my solution - Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but Glide creates a new url link for Airtable attachments to be able to host the attachments within Glide since Airtable’s links expire every couple hours. So, I was able to export the records I needed from Glide, and the urls worked instead of exporting from Airtable