Hi! I've been a member of HN for fifteen years so today I'm very excited to share Plato.<p>Plato is an Airtable-like interface for your Postgres or MySQL database. It's an admin panel for devs and non-devs alike to manage your DB. We see teams use Plato for customer support, customer success, ops, etc..<p>We built Plato because we think more people should be able to build and extend internal tools. We thought it was strange that even though low-code is supposed to democratize development, all of the low-code internal tool builders are marketed to engineers! Airtable is a familiar UI that fits the relational model well, so we've been inspired by their work. Even the engineers on our team use Plato quite a bit, since it's often easier than spinning up a SQL prompt.<p>Some features:<p>- Postgres and MySQL support<p>- Visual query controls (sorts, filters, hiding columns). No SQL.<p>- Joins by "expanding" foreign keys<p>- Virtual columns for tracking new data<p>- Auto-generated backlinks for one-to-many relationships<p>- Read-only locking for individual tables<p>- Virtual tables for sharing new views with your team<p>Plato today works on databases with a public IP (just whitelist our IP to connect), but we're soon rolling out an on-prem version. We can also set up an SSH tunnel for you if you contact us at team@plato.io.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback! Thanks.<p>- Michael
For any such tool, two questions are of primary importance:<p>- How connections between multiple tables are represented and managed<p>- How derived data is described (queries, workflows etc.)<p>Typically such tools are aimed at simplifying data <i>connections</i> but normally they end up with some kind of join-like approach which requires high expertise and is error prone. So users have to deal with something they wanted to get rid of when they buy the tool. Plato is not an exception: "No SQL needed". Yet, I could not find any information on how exactly it manages connections between tables and how the unified "virtual table" is defined.<p>The second question is about how we can derive new data from existing data. Ideally, users would like to have something very similar to Excel because spreadsheets are indeed extremely intuitive: we define new cells as functions of other cells (which in turn might be functions of other cells). In Plato I found "virtual columns" which should be rather useful. This is somewhat similar to the <i>column-oriented</i> approach implemented in Prosto [0]. Yet, what is really non-trivial is how to define (derived) columns by combining data from multiple tables.<p>In general, the tool looks very promising and I hope that additional features and additional information will make it really popular.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/asavinov/prosto">https://github.com/asavinov/prosto</a> Prosto is a data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby
Wow, there are so many of these spreadsheet wrapper around data products now. It feels like a new one shows up on HN every day. Just yesterday <a href="https://mathesar.org" rel="nofollow">https://mathesar.org</a> was on here and there's been at least another dozen or so in recent weeks.<p>I suspect that the space really needs to target specific use cases and nail those experiences.
"When helping our friends at a fintech startup, we saw that while they had spent weeks building an admin panel from scratch, their accountants seldom used it."<p>It sounds like your friends didn't talk to the accountants to ask them what they wanted.
Congrats on the launch!<p>We use Metabase at our company (created and managed by a non developer). Can you share some reasons for us to switch to Plato?
Someone pointed me to NocoDB as an alternative to Airtable here on HN a few days ago. I deployed an instance, and it does what it says on the tin. Supports SQL Server, Oracle and even SQLite, in addition to Postgres and MySQL.<p>Do you have any additional “killer feature(s)” that might convince me to switch?
Cool! This definitely fills a niche I’ve felt the pain for. I want to love Airtable so badly, but it severely limits how expressive you can be with your own data. I’d check this out, but I’m admittedly not interested in managing my own db somewhere.
Neat! I'm a heavy Airtable user (for personal things) that has been toying with moving to SQLite for some things, mostly to gain understanding around SQL topics. But losing Airtable's UI would be a pain, so I'll definitely bookmark this.<p>Good luck!
Congratulations on launching! I'm working on a open source project that solves a similar problem, there's so many challenges with figuring out UI and UX for real-life databases. Your virtual columns concept looks neat!
In your home screen ( <a href="https://www.plato.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.plato.io/</a> ) the screenshot has a Purchase column that has multiple values. Does that not violate 1NF?<p>The first normal form (1NF) requires that each column in a table must hold atomic (indivisible) values, meaning that each value in the column must be unique and cannot contain multiple pieces of data.<p>I know Airtable has it, but this is an RDBMS focused product, and it seems to encourage poor habits.
Why do all the upcoming interfaces for the Databases have no command line like VS Code or linear? I wish I could switch tables just by pressing ALT + T and typing the table name. Looks nice tho, good job! For me, no reason to switch from DBeaver, unless I can work more efficient, which is only possible if I can use plato without my mouse as much as possible.
Looks great! I've never used Airtable so miss the comparisons. Is Plato like a faster to use version of Django admin? That's usually how I set up my admin UIs and one of the top reasons I use django.
My 2 c on first impression - you’re hitting the ‘Airtable for’ language so hard and so often that I had trouble parsing out whether your tool was a middleware that unlocked new features for Airtable or not.
Sorry to ask a stupid question, but wtf is AirTable? I can't even find screenshots on your site that explain what your product does without referencing this other thing I have no idea about!
This looks awesome, and exactly what I've been thinking about. However, when trying to connect to my postgres db, I'm getting the following error:<p>no pg_hba.conf entry for host
Awesome stuff!<p>I noticed you are using Notion for your docs so i tried creating a website using Notaku [0]<p>Here is how it looks: <a href="https://plato-preview.notaku.site/" rel="nofollow">https://plato-preview.notaku.site/</a><p>[0] <a href="https://notaku.so" rel="nofollow">https://notaku.so</a>