Linked bases using Integromat or backend service

[Adam_Abbott]

Have you integrated your Airtable bases with a backend data service/database/or used Integromat to draw information for other bases? Can you help with the below?

We’re a GAAS platform that use Airtable to execute various company wide and customer requirements.

One of these specifically is how we execute growth projects for customers. We have a central project template with predesigned workflows that we rollout for each customer project. One problem here is that version control gets hard to manage given that Airtable doesn’t allow you to create parent/child templates, ie so you can deploy changes to a template to all active projects that utilise that specific template.

As a means to deal with part of this problem we’d like to build out a backend data service that would enable us to pull in generic information into a base and keep that part at least centralised.

An example use case:

• A user on the project team creates a new experiment within the relevant tab on a project base. They will then select an ad platform this experiment will run on. When they select the ad platform this information is pulled in from a backend data store and applied to the column.

In this case we would simply have a database or external data store of some description that would enable our team to update the ad platforms we use and then make those available to all project bases. We have a number of requirements for these sorts of use cases.

Questions:

• Have you ever setup a backend service to store and call in data within your Airtable bases? If so what does your stack look like and how did you achieve the solution?

• Has anyone ever linked bases via Integromat? One such solution is that we can create 1 base and store all the centralised data there, then add Integromat to the template base so that we can call in data from the reference base.

Other solutions:

• Firebase backend service -
• Zapier based solutions. Given our use case here is solely one way this is another option however in the event we want to go two way we’re back to the drawing board pretty quickly.

Any advice from anyone who has solved this problem would be appreciated.

[openside]

We have several clients using our On2Air: Actions product to implement 1-way and even 2-way syncs between tables/bases. If interested, we can help you get that set up.

[IT_BeeTee]

Hi Adam,

We have implemented both solutions in our system (i.e. backend and using Integromat). Here are a few tips:

• Backend services are useful in cases when data is used and processed heavily in your system.
• If you only need to copy data from one to another base then use Integromat (you can even perform a few manipulations on the output) since it will save you a lot of time and effort.
• In Integromat, if you set a task (i.e. scenario) to run every minute and your task is triggered by some changes in Airtable which is quite common, it will cost you 1 operation per minute just to listen to data changes if any. Unfortunately, Integromat charges based on operations and data transfer hence this set up is expensive. However, you can use another app such as https://ifttt.com/ for listening to changes in Airtable then trigger Integromat to run accordingly.

Good luck and have fun,

Alex

[IanYanusko]

If you want to pull data from a database or data warehouse (postgres, firebase, mongo, snowflake, etc.) into Airtable AND update your backend data store from Airtable, then you should check out Bracket. You just have to input your Airtable API key and connect it to your database. It handles syncs in just one direction or both directions at the same time.

There's also features that you can customize. If you only want to sync certain fields in two directions and make other fields read-only in Airtable, or if you want to write queries to make the data you pull into Airtable very customizable, then that's all possible!