Hi HN! I’m the lead engineer on Retool Database.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We’re giving you 5GB free storage for the first year + connection strings so you can access your data outside Retool.<p>Lots of learnings as we built this—happy to answer any question you have!
Looks super snazzy:<p>Can I point Retool Database to an existing Postgres database? If not, do y'all have any plans to add support?<p>How's it work under the hood? Custom extensions?
I think Retool is awesome - though last time I think I didn't see a way to allow clients to have access to certain views. We have some databases we'd love to generate views for client access, but we don't need them to have full blown accounts. Is that something on the horizon?
Congrats. Looks like it will be useful for plenty of folks. Can you outline how it compares with e.g. NocoDB [0] and others mentioned in another comment [1]?<p>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 :)<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb">https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35381252" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35381252</a><p>[2] <a href="https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations" rel="nofollow">https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations</a>
Very cool, can you give any details about how this was built? Just a massive Postgres cluster with programmatic schema creation? Or a primary/replica hosted on K8s for each user and offloaded to blob storage after some period of inactivity?
Hey just wanted to take this chance to thank the Retool people. Retool was absolutely essential for our last startup. And they have been super responsive with bugs. A great product!
I've been using Retool Database inside a Retool Workflow and I find my update queries don't seem to resolve in the workflow, although I can see the updates in the table. I've just chalked it up to beta status, but since y'all are here I thought I might ask if this is a known issue or if I should reach out to support.<p>Edit to add: really killer addition to the product, keep up the great work
I think building this as a tool on top of Postgres was a very good idea. Is there anything special Retool DB does on top of Postgres or is it basically just a nice UI for interacting with your tables?
Are there good video resources for Retool in general, I looked at some youtube videos and found mostly creating a basic database view with a form. Any more substantial examples?
This is good news. Retool-local storage was a big missing piece of the puzzle for us.<p>For self-hosted customers, is the database still on-premises? Or does it live in the Retool cloud?