Best Practice for Airtable Design with many bases - Lots of Links or Central Database?

[Daniel_Kasuardi]

To those experienced users out there.
I am a new user of Airtable.

I am planning to use Airtable to track Quality.

In this case, I have (A lot) of bases.

1. Database of products
2. Sales Order Input. Refer to Database of products for one field
3. Base for Production Planning. Refer to Multiple fields on Sales Order Input
4. Base for Shipping Planning. Refer to Multiple fields on Sales Order Input
5. Base for Phase 1 Production Tracking
6. Base for 1st Quality Inspection.
7. Base for Repair Tracking (on 1st Quality Inspection)
8. Base for Phase 2 Production Tracking
9. Base for 2nd Quality Inspection
10. Base for Repair Tracking (on 2nd Quality Inspection)
11. Base for Shipping Quality Inspection
12. Base for # orders, production, and shipping.

There’s also another base to aggregate all the NCR on all those bases, and some others … but I will skip those for now.

My question is this.

1. Is this common in Airtable? Having a lot of shared bases, I mean.
2. Some of my items can be done either by linked table or by automation (when records created). For example, when I make record in BASE 1, record should appear in BASE 4 and BASE 12 as well.
   Is the best practice is to make ONE full database and linked?
3. My BASE 4 to 8 is actually pretty linked. The records refer to similar field. Is the best practice is to make one big Base as Database and Populate from there using automation, or making a sync table for each?

Thanks and regards.

[Tony_Fitzpatric]

While I am by no means an Airtable expert, i have been playing around with it for various business functions for a wee while now.

Sounds to me like you would be better off using fewer larger tables and use views to show the different outputs you are trying to achieve.

If tables 4-8 are just taking data already entered in another table then it would probably be more efficient for these especially to use views, you can set views up to show the data in various ways, filtered and / or grouped on various parameters, in a number of useful formats.

I hope that helps in some way

[Daniel_Kasuardi]

Tony_Fitzpatrick:

ed in another table then it would probably be more efficient for these especially to use views, you can set views up to show the data in various ways, filtered and / or grouped on various parameters, in a

Yes. That is my current plan as well.
I am currently exploring it. View is a really great features in Airtable.
The only issue in this is that the other input would only be read-only users and has to submit through form view.

But I suppose it works.
Thanks

Daniel