Deep Matching - No results

Hey ​@Jeroen_Sarink,

I’m not experiencing this issue myself. It does take a VERY VERY long time to find the best match, even for tables of only two records. Having said that, it does work. Do you get a “no results found” or similar, or does it take forever searching?


If the issue persits I’d suggest you reach out to support@airtable.com and make sure to ask for a human answer. They are usually nice and helpful!

If it helps, I’d be happy to hop on a brief call w you and take a look at it. Feel free to grab a slot if you think that can help in any way.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Lucky you ;)

This is all I'm getting: it starts with ´Generating...´ and after a long while (15 mins?) it changes to ‘Still pending: Queued for generation...’. Finally (after approx. 2 hours?), the process ends with a ‘Something went wrong...’ message.

Oh, I see. That seems to be Runtime error, right?  “Couldn’t generate within time limit…..”

Let me be super clear: My test was actually sing a two record table. Would you mind setting up a new view to show only one record for example, and give it a shot?

Under my test, it was taking a very long time with only 2 records. I can imagine how +100 record table would result in timeout (obviously a big issue).

I’ll test with bigger tables later today and keep you posted! For anybody not aware of what Deep Match is, you can read more about it here.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

I've done some more testing and it seems to be linked to the base in which the tables live.

Nearly empty test base

🟢 I've created two test tables with a deep match link between them and the links are generated after a few seconds.

Our regular base

🔴 I've recreated the exact same test tables, records and deep match settings, but without any results.

This base is quite heavily used, with approx. 300k records and a lot of ´real-time’ syncing going on through the API. We´re getting API timeouts on these syncs regularly (multiple each day), so I guess this base is pushing Airtable's performance limits. I assume this is the cause of the Deep Matching issue.

I'll get in touch with Airtable support about this.

Thanks for your help ​@Mike_AutomaticN!

Oh, really interesting debugging!!

Please do make sure to reach out to support though, I’d love to know their answer.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Hey ​@Jeroen_Sarink! We’ve been progressively rolling out support for Deep Matching in larger bases while in Labs, and as you suspected, the 300k base row count was most likely the reason you weren’t getting results. We should be above that as of this afternoon if you’d like to give it another try! It may take some time to get initial results when matching to/from large tables, but should be faster once results start coming in. If you have any other issues or feedback - as Mike mentioned - definitely write in to support and we’d be happy to help.

Hey ​@alonso-at!

1. Deep Matching is a great feature. I’m currently not relying on it heavily, but I do know that I will be using this.
2. Just knowing that you guys are increasing performance for larger bases is great to know. Even if we are not there yet.
3. Thanks for taking the time in going through the Community Posts. I’d love to get more of Airtable’s Product voices here!

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Hi ​@alonso-at,
Thanks for the update! I've tried linking between two test tables (5 records each) within our 300k base, but no luck yet.

I've created a copy of the entire base and (though it takes a while) it does successfully link between the two test tables. This suggests that the API load on the base chokes the AI performance.

I'll keep trying over the next days/weeks to see if there´s any improvement.

Deep matching started working on our large base last week 🥳

Thanks Airtable team for improving the performance of this feature!

Niceeeeeee

​@Jeroen_Sarink ​@alonso-at I wonder if this issue presented itself again or it was fixed or there’s some sort of best practices:

I’m trying to deep match two tables based on 1 Single Line Text field. The tables themselves have less than 100 records. Deep Match simply doesn’t work / times out.

Any help / direction much appreciated!

In our case it seems to be linked to the load on our base(s). When base load increases, both API calls and AI fields time out.

However, we've seen huge performance improvements on the AI fields in December, so we actually use these now without any workarounds or so.

Hey ​@Jeroen_Sarink,

Out of curiosity. What do you mean that you now use AI fields? Are you making reference to deep match or something completely different? If different, how does an AI Field “replaces” your need for the deep match?

Might be getting it completely wrong here…
 

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join the March 2026 AT Community led Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel 

Both deep matching and field agents, but since the topic was on deep matching that was what I was referring to.

Oh, ok got it. Thanks ​@Jeroen_Sarink!!!