Spreadsheets are often used as “poor man’s databases”—they’re quick to get started, but fall apart when you need data integrity, validation, and the ability to query/filter data.
This is why I am so excited about this launch - Retool Database gives you the power of Postgres with the “getting started” speed of a spreadsheet. No setup required.
We've also spent a lot of time on the UI for interacting with the database as well. You can create and edit tables, columns, and rows quickly without writing SQL. You should be able to get the same speed of iteration as spreadsheets, but you are also starting from the get-go that can handle the increasing complexity of your data and scale much better with app development.
We’re giving you 5GB free storage for the first year + connection strings so you can access your data outside Retool.
Lots of learnings as we built this—happy to answer any question you have!
I started things off, just kept clicking "yes, yes", made a database called "shopping", and now...
I just seem to have an empty page? There is 'id' and 'created_at'.
I can "Add row", which just let's me specify "id", which has to be a number.
There is a button marked "fields", which tells me my fields are "id" and "created_at", but doesn't seem to have any way to add new fields.
I then, at my last guess, tried doing "import CSV". It asks me to choose a field for each column. I don't have any fields yet. I want to make some. Why can't I pick "this should be a new field"?
Anyway, import CSV just tells me 'Syntax error at or near ")"' when I try running it. There are no close brackets in my CSV, so no idea where that is coming from.
NocoDB (https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb) - works w/ MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite, MariaDB
Baserow (https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow) - PostgreSQL based
APITable (https://github.com/apitable/apitable) - MySQL based
But I would have to say - modern day databases are so fast that you probably won't notice the performance of adding indexes until at least 100k+ rows in a table and/or you have very high read throughput on that particular table.
Can I point Retool Database to an existing Postgres database? If not, do y'all have any plans to add support?
How's it work under the hood? Custom extensions?
No custom extensions - we wanted to make it a lightweight and effective layer on top of Postgres. So it’s just a vanilla Postgres database under the hood. The UI gives you access to a lot of the power of Postgres, and for anything that you can’t do via the UI you can use the connection string directly: e.g. create triggers, create compound unique keys, etc.
I wish to be able to pay yearly. We are on a hosted solution.
As for "getting started" speed and general data tinkering, I find little beats Gnumeric -> CSV -> SQLite query [2] although I appreciate that solo developers aren't your target market :)
[0] https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35381252
[2] https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations
Retool Database has that friendly table UI but also give you the full query capability via SQL (we even give you the Postgres connection string that let you connect to it externally with your favorite tool).
Edit to add: really killer addition to the product, keep up the great work
There are some URLs on a table, I want to select them and I want to make an API call to the selected URLs. There are a few discussions on their community website and all point to one documentation piece. I still haven't figured out how to do this. I don't want open a thread because I know I am going to be asked to read the documentation.
Google "multiple api request retool".
https://retoolhacks.retool.com/embedded/public/17eebce9-96f3...
If this is close to what you're looking for, you can import this sample app from this JSON export:
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kwhinnery/4fed2a80788f429...
An example of this is the Table components, which allows you to create columns and set them a specific type, but that component documentation page doesn't include a section about which column types are allowed and how they work. Even further, there's a column type called Tag that it's available for us to use, but we don't have documentation about it and Tag documentation isn't helpful either,
It wouldn't hurt to add some common examples like a storybook along some way to let us see how to configure the components like that, or json examples we can import into our projects.
For self-hosted customers, is the database still on-premises? Or does it live in the Retool cloud?
