Build charts and dashboards by connecting Airtable to Metabase

[Eric_Goldman1]

If you are looking to pull insights from your Airtable data, try connecting your Airtable base to Metabase to easily build interactive graphs and dashboards.

Metabase is an open source BI tool where you can easily summarize and visualize your data. You can connect Airtable to Metabase using a tool I helped build, Sync Inc.

We’ve been blown away by the kinds of dashboards people are building - so we wrote up a tutorial that walks through how to do it:

docs.syncinc.so

Metabase | Sync Inc

Sync Inc replicates Airtable to a Postgres database, giving you the best of both worlds.

Also - shout out to @Paul_Coates who showed us how you can then embed dashboards like these back in Airtable using the Embed app. Then your team will have all the information they need without ever leaving Airtable.

Hope you find this useful :slightly_smiling_face:

[Paul_Coates]

Really appreciate the mention.

Hope all is well with you.

Paul

[Josh_Lawrence1]

Hey Goldman,

I was wondering if this integration also worked with MySQL databases other than with Postgres databases.

Thanks,
Mattia

[Eric_Goldman1]

Hey @Josh_Lawrence1

Thanks for checking out Sequin! Right now we only support Postgres - but we plan to support MySQL in the future!

[Rep_Guide_Tech]

Hi Eric,

does your solution sync in both ways?
Can I write to the Postgres and change the Airtable data this way?

Greetings
Helge

[Jon_Vance]

Really cool. I’m trying to base questions on airtable columns that are functions but it appears that Metabase is converting function fields as text. Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

[Eric_Goldman1]

Hey @Jon_Vance - thanks for using Sequin with Metabase to build metrics/dashboards on Airtable! I’m one of the co-founders of Sequin - so wanted to chime in here.

Out of the box, we cast Airtable formula fields to TEXT in your database. We do this because an Airtable formula can return either text, numbers, or dates - but the Airtable API doesn’t let us know which one. So setting these fields to type TEXT is the safest option to ensure we don’t alter your data.

You can then alter the field type in Metabase by casting the values to the forum you need. Tow options to do this:

SQL You can write a custom question in Metabase and use CAST to set the value to the right type. We explain more in our cheat sheet:

SELECT
formula_field::numeric
FROM
table;

Metabase admin: Or, in the Metabase Admin, you can set the field types.