| [HN Gopher] Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) - A new UI and editor ...
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Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) - A new UI and editor for your
database
Hi HN - we are Brandon and Brayden (confusing we know), and we are
building Outerbase (https://www.outerbase.com) a better interface
for your databases. Think Google Sheets or Airtable, but on your
relational database. We provide a collaborative UI on top of
Postgres, MySQL and other databases, enabling teams to view, edit
and visualize their data. Here's our short demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38RslBYdZnk Accessing data is a
challenge to team members who aren't data analysts or engineers.
Databases are usually locked down to a few team members, and
everybody else has to rely on them to get access. Most non-
engineers can't (and don't want to) use developer tools, and
developers don't want to write SQL for teammates all day. Technical
employees end up being bottlenecks for access to data. In some
cases this can be extreme--we've seen publicly traded companies
with only 2 data scientists for the whole org! Our goal is to make
data accessible to everyone who needs it. We have an intuitive
spreadsheet-like editor that sits on top of your databases, as well
as the capability to save and share queries. You can take those
queries to create charts and dashboards for your team. You can also
query your data using EZQL, our natural-language-to-SQL conversion.
We use OpenAI to power the natural language process, and we pass
the relational schema on top so we can easily know the
relationships between your tables. Prior to starting Outerbase, I
(Brandon) was a product designer at DigitalOcean and noticed that
while DO did a good job making it simple to create databases, there
wasn't a modern solution to manage them afterwards. Often users had
to use PHPMyAdmin, psql, or $insertDBGUIHere, and to be honest most
of them do not provide the best user experience. They're for a very
technical audience, and fall short of making data accessible for
everyone. We saw a need to do for data what DigitalOcean did with
the droplet. Brayden led an engineering team at Walmart and dealt
with data at a completely different scale. He led the iOS, Android,
and web teams for their amends experience and a lot of time was
spent pulling, querying, and generating reports on that data. So
when we talked about building this he was immediately in. How it
works: We have a React-based frontend that uses a combination of
Sequelize and some native libraries to normalize the underlying
SQL, which allows us to query and connect to different relational
databases. Currently we support Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake,
BigQuery, and Redshift. We don't store any of your end data--
everything else is encrypted and all credentials are stored in KMS.
Tools like Outerbase make it possible for people to do their jobs
more directly. One of our larger customers uses us as a way to
moderate what gets posted to their app. Users submit data and our
customer will actually go in and mark a column approved if the
content is ok for their audience. Outerbase is available to use
today. You can try it for free with 1 user and then if you want to
collaborate or use additional features you can upgrade to our pro
tier or the obligatory "call us" enterprise tier. We would love to
hear your thoughts on the product, you can sign up today for free,
use the sandbox database or connect your own! We know the space
isn't exactly uncrowded, but we hope our approach to building
something that is intuitive and collaborative will make it easier
for everyone to access their data. We know some HN users are not
our target audience because they're technical and already have
tools they're comfortable with--but even then you might want a tool
so your team doesn't have to bug you as much with data requests! We
let you simply give them read access to their db and enable them to
do their own queries. We'd love to hear your views, opinions,
experiences about this. What would you want to see from a
database/data visualization tool? Looking forward to discussion in
the comments!
Author : burcs
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-03-16 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
| inssein wrote:
| Oh man I kind of built something like this. I took the project
| down because I got semi-burned out while also having a full time
| job. I have a video still up at https://github.com/aidmin-
| io/docs. Feedback on HN was that companies wouldn't trust it
| unless they could run it in their own infra, but clearly there is
| a huge need with BaseDash and now another similar company funded
| by YC.
|
| HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26853339
| burcs wrote:
| I love this! You should definitely bring it back to life, but
| fully understand the side-project burnout, that's what lead us
| to build this full-time haha.
|
| Completely understand the running on own-infra it's something
| we offer our enterprise customers as it's a bigger lift on our
| end as well.
|
| Happy to hop on a call or zoom or whatever to chat through all
| the challenges we ran into while building this, would love to
| hear more about aidmin as well!
| ushakov wrote:
| Why not restart your project? What are you scared of? HN
| comments? No funding?
|
| As an open-source solution you can a have higher chance of
| succeeding and a higher retention rate than proprietary ones.
| You can raise a seed round just as they did
|
| Feel free to e-mail me, I have sold a open-source startup in
| the past and co-founded another last year
| inssein wrote:
| I think this was sort of the key issue, it wasn't open
| source, but the docs / website was. Have been thinking of
| cleaning it up and open sourcing it.
| ushakov wrote:
| Didn't notice there were no sources in the repository, but
| yes, try again!
| go_prodev wrote:
| In an earlier comment you mentioned evolving into a BI
| dashboarding tool. I'm interested to learn more about this
| roadmap and how you'd differentiate yourself from Power BI and
| Tableau?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Our thinking behind BI, we believe, is quite different than how
| we think Power BI, Looker, and Tableau look at the problem.
|
| Today's large tools require in-depth specialized knowledge on
| the data as well as how to apply it to create dashboards. Our
| mission is to create data tools that non-developers can
| understand, use, and create impact with on day 1.
|
| One feature we're really excited about is how to hold a
| conversation with your database to fine tune the chart you want
| in natural language, and have "verified" sources come in to
| double check what has been produced meets the expectations of
| the business. Certainly a lot more things on the way as well.
| woollyhat wrote:
| Do you intend to offer an on-premise version of your product?
|
| From a data security perspective, I would be very wary about
| granting access to our company databases to an online service
| such as this, but much more comfortable hosting it internally.
| burcs wrote:
| Right now this is a feature we are offering enterprise sized
| contracts. We have talked a lot about offering a self-hosted
| version for others as well though.
|
| Completely understand the concerns around data security, that's
| not something we take lightly at all. We have other ways of
| accessing VPCs without having to poke holes in your network as
| well, including private links, VPN connections, and VPC-to-VPC
| peering.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| - Fantastic concept, looks absolutely promising! - I never do
| monthly subscriptions! - I never do Mac-only! - SQLite missing
| for now (and I wonder how it would be accessed by Outerbase?)
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| Do you generally use Annual Plans or freemium instead? Not the
| author or affiliated with them.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Annual Plans, if I purchase for a customer and only for time
| limited projects.
|
| For myself I purchase only non-expiring licenses with a one-
| time fee. It is absolutely fine if I have to pay again for
| upgrades from time to time, but I want to be able to decide
| to not upgrade and still use my work for another 20 years,
| when the vendor is already forgotten. And provided, I still
| have compatible hardware ;-)
|
| A good example would be Softmaker, which I am happily paying
| for (but they also nag me every other day, if I wouldn't
| rather like to switch to subscription).
| burcs wrote:
| Appreciate that! So we do have a web app, that you can utilize
| from anywhere, some have even used their phones, not sure I
| recommend that experience yet though haha. I need to optimize
| it more.
|
| SQLite should work, I just want to test it more before
| launching. If you'd be interested in beta testing that with me
| would love to chat more!
| ushakov wrote:
| Can this connect to private/internal databases?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Currently we allow databases to whitelist our IP address and
| access from anywhere.
|
| For internal databases we do offer VPN and on-prem (Dockerized)
| solutions for our enterprise customers.
|
| Private databases that are on localhost we don't _currently_
| support on our native Mac app but it's on our roadmap!
| ushakov wrote:
| Downloaded your "native Mac app"
|
| Turns out it's just Electron
|
| Disappointed. Will stick to TablePlus
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah I get it. We wanted to get a local version out there
| as it's what a lot of people want, but as you can imagine a
| full native mac app takes a ton of time to deliver.
|
| We thought Electron would be a nice interim until we go
| down the route further.
|
| I know Electron doesn't get a lot of love, is it the file
| size, the UX, or what about it makes it less desirable for
| you?
| ushakov wrote:
| I understand. The issue was with your communication
|
| In the comment above you told you have a "native Mac
| app". I almost got excited only to discover it's
| Electron, argh
|
| Maybe next time you shouldn't use "native" when it's
| clearly not native. Just to set expectations right
| s1k3s wrote:
| Love the pitch video, absolutely nails it. I'd go even further
| and remove the SQL stuff from down below. It seems like you're
| trying to cater to a non-technical audience, for whom those might
| be confusing (as a tech guy I'd never use this really anyway). I
| don't like that there's no self-hosted version, but I guess you
| guys know your market better.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions.
|
| For the SQL stuff being displayed, we like that it gives non-
| technical users an opportunity to learn SQL along the way. Now
| providing it as an optional UI is a worthy consideration for us
| to perhaps make.
|
| We do have a self-hosted version on our enterprise offering
| currently but I understand it might not be the most desirable
| for non-enterprise customers.
| foxbee wrote:
| This looks very interesting. Who do you think is your target
| user? Why did you not decide to go down the open source route -
| not being critical, just curious.
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah we have gone back and forth a lot about the open-source
| route, and still talk about it frequently. Our target audience
| is non-technical team members so the thought of open-sourcing
| didn't make a ton of sense from that standpoint.
|
| However, it does make sense for their technical team members to
| launch this for them and give them access to the data.
| cwg218 wrote:
| Exciting news!
| kgodey wrote:
| Congratulations on launching! I run an open source project
| solving similar problems, and would love to compare notes
| sometime.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Absolutely. Feel free to reach out to us and we would love to
| connect & compare notes :)
| emptysea wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Tableplus but always interested in new
| developments in this space.
|
| Mongo Atlas has a really great database editor / UI built into
| their web UI but ofc it's Mongo only.
|
| Curious if you have plans to support connecting to a database
| over SSH? I have a database running on a VM and I can connect to
| via an SSH tunnel. Avoids having to expose the database to the
| internet.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Yes, great question! We do have support for connecting to
| databases over SSH on our very near term release roadmap.
| Avoiding exposing databases to the internet is a common theme
| we hear and is important for us to tackle quickly.
| marban wrote:
| Last time MongoDB Compass crashed on my Mac, a Firefox log came
| up -- Seems like they've repacked FF into a standalone app.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Great launch guys!
|
| What is the difference between Retool, Basedash and Outerbase
| other than they are all funded by YC?
| burcs wrote:
| Great question! Our focus is making data easily accessible for
| your team rather than building out internal dashboards.
|
| I'm a big fan of Retool and Basedash and love what they have
| done, but there's still some initial learnings there to build
| those experiences, where we want to enable users to come in and
| immediately see their data and start interacting with it.
|
| I see a future where we end up replacing more traditional BI
| tools rather than internal tools, if that makes sense?
| systems wrote:
| what is basedash, and what is "an admin panel", i visited their
| site and google for like 10 minutes and still no clue what this
| is
|
| retool is a rad platfrom, i found it when i was looking for an
| MS lightswitch replacement, so its clear what it is
|
| also outerbase is a bit strange, its a cloud db interface and
| the download link is for mac (not windows, mac) , the use cases
| seem very particular (niche) to me
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah we had a windows version as well, it was a bit buggy so
| we decided to launch without it.
|
| I'm curious why does use case sound niche? We love to think
| that giving everyone access to data is a pretty big challenge
| to solve. Is it in our messaging or do you think the overall
| vision is off? Would love to understand how we could be more
| clear in what we are providing.
| systems wrote:
| the market is huge, different people need different things
| making a cloud app is not niche, the mac only client was a
| bit unusual
|
| for internal apps, moving to the cloud is a big step for
| most places i worked in, its a huge step
|
| I just find it striking, that its considered as a casual
| thing or the norm, nowadays
|
| I think maybe you might want to explain on your site, why
| puting your internal db on the cloud is safe, easy ... and
| not a big deal
| maxmusing wrote:
| Basedash founder here. We're much more focused on admin panels
| that you would give to non-technical teammates (e.g. support,
| ops, sales) to view & edit data. Less around data analysis and
| charts, though we have a bit of that. We're also not limited to
| databases, you can set up actions to hit APIs (e.g. Stripe,
| SendGrid, internal APIs).
| debarshri wrote:
| Hey guys. I am not sure but you might have a security issue or a
| bug where in anyone can access the database page without login
| [1]. It give me link to logout and stuff but keeps through
| errors. UI breaks here too when click on members [2]
|
| [1] https://app.outerbase.com/databases
|
| [2] https://app.outerbase.com/settings
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Thanks for the call out here on this bug!
|
| We are working on a resolution to this issue right now. This is
| an issue with our logout function on the frontend not removing
| the auth token. There is no risk of scope access outside of
| your machine.
|
| We will push out a fix shortly.
|
| EDIT: Fix has been deployed. Thanks again!
| typosaur wrote:
| It appears like your fix didn't work
|
| It now just redirects to the auth page. Clicked on the back
| button in my browser and _voila_
|
| https://imgur.com/a/EvMaVu9
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Hmm I wonder if this is a caching issue. It seems to be
| working on our part and no data is ever loaded. If you'd be
| willing to talk through a bit further I'd love to. brayden
| [at] outerbase [dot] com.
| CamJN wrote:
| Assuming you use a token similar to JWT , then redirects
| and removing the token from the client don't matter if
| you don't blacklist the token on the backend, which if
| they were able to continue by hitting the back button
| seems the case. This does require you to keep a database
| of "logged-out" tokens and reject them, and occasionally
| run a cleanup script on the db to prune tokens from that
| table after they would have expired, but that's what is
| required when you use auth tokens for login.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Appreciate your taking the time to give us this
| suggestion -- but to clarify, we do revoke the token :D
|
| From the screenshot that was provided, they're seeing the
| client render a page, but it's failing to acquire any
| data from the API. If they opened the network inspector
| they'd likely see that the requests are 401'ing after
| logging out.
|
| I'm not pretending that this is good UX -- it's not --
| but it's not evidence of a security issue. That said, we
| have every intention of nailing down fantastic UX as
| quickly as possible. (I'm a recent addition to the
| company but) it pains me personally for anyone to see any
| mistakes and I hope to impress you soon.
| debarshri wrote:
| I will be really honest. I see tools like this
| complimentary to what we are building (general purpose
| access and authorization service) so I was really looking
| forward to play with the tool.
|
| I see some issues with the current version of the
| product. I think it is 2 cycles behind from being really
| ready for the the market. First cycle would be feature
| parity and second cycle could be for robustness because
| there are alternative that are better. EZSQL is nice but
| feel very gimmicky.
|
| But there is potential. I know YC's advice is to launch
| as soon as possible but it is not applicable for all
| domain and products esp. in enterprise because you have
| only have few shots to impress people and decision maker
| are few.
|
| Having said that, there is potential. I am not sure how
| you can scale the integrations with dbs really fast. You
| will start seeing problem when you venture out of
| standard databases and start integrating clickhouse, big
| query etc. Also, you should consider Grafana as your
| competitor too as major engineering enterprise do use
| Grafana as their admin panel.
|
| PS. please take my feedback with grain of salt.
|
| But I think you guys will figure it out.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Looks promising, and approaching the quality of Panic's Mac
| products.
|
| But then I saw it's subscriptionware. Nope. I don't use
| subscriptionware for my personal computing. And the billion-
| dollar healthcare company I work for doesn't do software
| subscription unless you're Microsoft, or similarly indispensable.
| Startups need not apply.
|
| At least the pricing is clear and mostly visible, except for the
| enterprise tier. Much better than most subscription offerings
| these days that have even the lowest tiers locked behind a phone
| call.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Yeah but startups aren't going to make billion dollar
| valuations selling to you (or me) anyway. Subscriptions are for
| enterprises.
| rytill wrote:
| Can you describe how this software could sustainably be
| developed to serve you, and where you would fit in to that
| ecosystem?
|
| How would someone who makes software to help you interact with
| your database and write queries using AI buy food and pay rent,
| if they didn't already have money?
|
| Are you implying that if their software was open source, with a
| self-hostable version, you would use that, and contribute back
| to the community, which would provide them some service value?
| bachmeier wrote:
| > How would someone who makes software to help you interact
| with your database and write queries using AI buy food and
| pay rent, if they didn't already have money?
|
| Just FYI, many companies sell software at less than
| $600/user/year.
| akho wrote:
| By selling perpetual per-seat licenses and an integration
| contract, same as everybody else who works with corporations.
| It's not exactly novel. Software existed before
| subscriptions.
|
| I don't think the GP comment mentioned open source in any
| way.
| burcs wrote:
| First off, that might be the best compliment I have received, I
| love Panic and all that they do.
|
| I hear you, you can use us for free if you are a personal user.
| Meaning one connection, 5 saved queries, and a one dashboard.
| However, we want to be able to support users as they scale with
| their queries our expenses add up too. I hope you understand!
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > Introducing EZQL
|
| We soon have covered all kinds of flavours on SQL
| cmbothwell wrote:
| From a quick glance this could be the missing piece for going all
| in on SQLite for small apps. Most plug-in admins only work with
| remotely accesible databases like Postgres.
|
| How would that work, does Outerbase run locally on my server
| instance?
|
| If it had some functionality for backups and a nice Auth story it
| could really be a good side project secret weapon.
| mediaman wrote:
| Regarding pricing: do you offer monthly subscriptions for "view-
| only" users?
|
| Here's my use-case. I am fine paying $50 a month for someone to
| make dashboards, create queries, etc.
|
| However, that's too much (and significantly above other tools)
| for the "users" of the product: for example, salespeople who I
| would like to enable to see what products their customers have
| used. I'd expect something in the 10-20 range per head per month
| for them, in exchange for more limited functionality.
|
| Some companies solve for this by charging for "creators"
| (dashboard designers, the people who set up the database
| connection, or run more custom queries) versus viewers. This
| encourages broader adoption within a company. $50/mo for any type
| of user is pretty steep.
| burcs wrote:
| Great point -- I love the idea of creators vs viewers.
|
| We are looking into building out a view-only mode that would be
| much more affordable. Potentially even embedded experiences so
| you could share reports internally without needing to actually
| log into Outerbase.
|
| Would that solve your use case?
| mediaman wrote:
| Yes, a view-only mode would work. Ideally it would not just
| be a static view, but would allow users to run some queries
| (perhaps constrained?) on the table, so they can get a list
| of their customers who ordered last quarter but not this
| quarter, for example, or other similar queries.
|
| But disallowing them from modifying the DB would be fine.
|
| Maybe limiting it to tables established by the Creator, and
| with a certain View/Dashboard arrangement, would work.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Potentially even embedded experiences so you could share
| reports internally without needing to actually log into
| Outerbase.
|
| Not OP, but this reminds me of Heroku Dataclips and I think
| you should strongly consider such a product feature.
|
| https://blog.heroku.com/how-dataclips-power-insights-at-
| hero...
|
| EDIT: Tremendous! Thanks for the reply!
| burcs wrote:
| One of our founding developers may or may not have helped
| build that out at Heroku hahaha. Definitely on the roadmap!
| mousetree wrote:
| This is the major problem we have with Retool. We have a
| handful of creators and hundreds of end-users (customer
| service, sales) where we're paying $50 each. Will inevitably
| tip the balance back to building these high usage apps by hand.
| kulikalov wrote:
| This is great! Thanks for BigQuery integration, I was passively
| looking for an alternative interface. Looking forward to try it.
| Possible feature request (not sure if you have it) - BigQuery
| creates temporary tables after each query run. When exploring the
| data it would be super cool to write queries sequentially by
| using those temporary tables. I do it in BigQuery UI, but it's
| quite tedious.
| bsid wrote:
| Connected my database and it's not showing anything, also no
| error messages in the UI, some 406s in the dev console. would be
| interested to try it out
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Good to know! Can take a look at the fact no error messages
| were surfaced to help identify the problem. If you want to hop
| on a call together and figure out the issue email me at -
| brayden [at] outerbase [dot] com - and I'm happy to hop on and
| get this working for you.
| bsid wrote:
| update: user error on my part, thanks for the help!
| chrisgat wrote:
| Same here. Trying to connect to a local db if that matters.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| At the moment we only support hosted databases and nothing
| from the local machine but we are working on adding support
| for this really soon! It's been much requested.
| samanator wrote:
| Will this be the interface that I need?
|
| Mathesar ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999774 ) was
| the last one I tried out but it couldn't support more than 250k
| rows without crashing and required foreign keys in order to infer
| relationships. Otherwise it's exactly what I want. An
| Excel/Airtable interface around a raw database connection.
|
| How does Outerbase compare?
|
| Edit:
|
| Mistypes
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We hope that it is the interface that you need!
|
| To be entirely candid and honest, returning a lot of rows
| presents problems on our end as well at the moment. It's
| something we are actively working on improving for large data
| sets to create the best user experience without having to
| concern yourself about what you're returning.
|
| For our EZQL (natural language to SQL) you don't necessarily
| need to have foreign keys to infer relationships between
| tables. We try to infer those relationships for you.
| kgodey wrote:
| Mathesar core team member here. I don't want to distract from
| Outerbase's launch, but if you have time, would you be able to
| open an issue for the crash at
| https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar? We're still in alpha
| and relying on people checking out the project to report
| problems like these so we can fix them.
|
| Also, relationships without foreign keys is on our roadmap:
| https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/2276
| samanator wrote:
| Sure! I'll file it this weekend.
| owenwil wrote:
| This is awesome--I love that you're building a tool that makes
| something that was previously scoped to a 'developer' tool
| available for regular users. Something like this for querying
| internal data would be a gamechanger for folks who struggle with
| SQL but need user insights!
| burcs wrote:
| Thank you - it definitely scratched an itch of mine. I knew my
| way around a lot of the compute from working at DigitalOcean
| but wanted to make accessing data/databases easier!
| samanator wrote:
| I'm running postgres on docker on an ec2 instance and outerbase
| lets me save the connection but doesn't show any schemas or let
| me query any tables.
|
| I've checked and double checked firewalls to make sure the IP is
| whitelisted. I'm able to connect with the same setup from my
| personal computer via psql (with the only difference being the ip
| whitelisted)by whitelisting it.
|
| Hope you get this working or add some improved connection
| diagnosist mechanism.
|
| Edit:
|
| If it helps, a POST request to
|
| https://app.outerbase.com/api/v1/workspace/39b72940-083d-4aa...
|
| Fails with a 503 response of > The server does not support SSL
| connections
|
| ... But it's not an SSL connection. I provided a plain ip
| address.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We are looking into this. Apologies for the issue. Plain IP
| addresses should work no problem. If it helps to connect and
| debug together feel free to send me an email at - brayden [at]
| outerbase [dot] com.
| slotrans wrote:
| "Databases are usually locked down to a few team members..."
|
| Not true in my experience. True at very large / very mature
| companies, but at any <5-year-old company the DB will be widely
| accessible, perhaps universally so. Certainly every engineer,
| every analyst, and every manager will have full access. (I'm sure
| someone will pipe in to disagree but this has been true for 10
| out of the last 10 companies I've worked with). Coming from
| DigitalOcean and Walmart it's not surprising you would make this
| mistake, not trying to dunk just want to suggest this might not
| be as big of a problem as you think.
|
| In that same vein, in a small company environment you don't
| harass engineers with query requests, you _learn SQL_. I 've seen
| hundreds of non-technical users do this (and helped many of
| them), it's not unusual. Visual query-building tools never help.
| Even good interfaces like Looker, on top of carefully-crafted
| data warehouses (which most won't have) are still vastly inferior
| to SQL and so analysts don't use them. Again, just trying to
| suggest the problem may not be what you think.
|
| Generating queries with a language model won't work. Real data is
| far messier than you expect. The table names and field names will
| not be as literal as you need them to be, and half the database
| will come with "special instructions" (like "oh you need to
| divide that field by 100 because...") that will not be inferrable
| from the names or the data. Many DBs will _completely_ lack
| foreign keys or consistent key naming. There will often be
| epochal "eras" in the data where everything before YYYY-MM-DD
| worked like X, and after that it's Y, and the value of that date
| is recorded nowhere.
|
| "Currently we support Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, and
| Redshift."
|
| I know Java isn't hip but consider relying on JDBC for DB access.
| There are more DBs out there than you can imagine, and 100% of
| them support JDBC. Otherwise there will always be some DB you're
| not supporting, and adding that support will be costly.
|
| Anyway just some food for thought. Good luck. (about me: 18 years
| in data & analytics)
| itake wrote:
| All of my jobs big (1k+ engineers) and small (me), the BE
| engineers had read access to most databases. The larger
| companies have some access controls, but if you needed access,
| it was almost always given.
| burcs wrote:
| That's a fair comment, If anything them not being locked down
| makes access to databases easier to connect to Outerbase.
|
| I agree that users should learn SQL, even when you use EZQL it
| returns the actual SQL in a fully-editable IDE that can be
| modified in whatever way you would want.
|
| Do you think that the existing tools out there provide a good
| environment for those non-technical teams to learn SQL?
|
| Maybe I'm biased but I have never been a huge fan of accessing
| data from the majority of the existing tools as they feel
| outdated and like tools built mostly for engineers.
| wharfjumper wrote:
| How does this compare to Nocodb, Baserow, and Mathesar?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Great question. The three you've listed have their own great
| use cases as a visual spreadsheet layout for databases.
|
| Some of our features that really help us stand out from this
| particular pack are the fact you can use EZQL in Outerbase to
| ask natural language questions on your database without knowing
| how to query (we'll even expose the SQL if you're interested in
| what was produced, great for learning SQL). Very helpful for
| larger databases. In addition to that you can take these
| queries and create data visualization right in our tool.
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| so outerbox connects directly to the db without using a bridge
| service like Mode does?
|
| meh, i don't want to allow inbound connections from the internet.
|
| i absolutely hate mode, but i liked their bridge connector.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We are working on providing VPN tunnel connections or VPC-to-
| VPC connections as well, but it's not quite available today.
| Thanks for sharing this concern with us!
| brap wrote:
| This is very cool, one usecase I definitely see for this is
| letting PMs get the answers they want without bothering eng.
|
| I would even take this further and hide the SQL altogether, and
| make this accessible via Slack/Teams bot.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| As a PM in a previous life, this is dead on.
|
| I need answers from queries in the DB but I don't have DB
| access and having me write sql queries is a waste of time.
| jrockway wrote:
| I always used Metabase for this.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Maybe the largest core beneficiary from a tool such as
| Outerbase are in fact product teams. That's where we know at
| larger companies pain is felt.
|
| We do have a Slack integration that isn't launched YET but is
| in internal testing to be released soon. Glad to hear this
| feedback and know we're on the right track with thoughts here!
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