When you want to build custom tools or websites on your Airtable data - then you’ll be using the Airtable API and almost certainly some JavaScript (in this case Node.js) to work with your data.
Soon you will probably start asking questions like:
- How do I paginate through the Airtable REST API?
- How do I manage the 5 calls / second rate limit in Airtable’s API?
- How can I find specific records using
filterBy?
- How do I use the API to return linked data from several tables?
TL;DR - the answers were just as tedious to build as we thought. So we built a tool and wrote a tutorial on how to skip the API and use Airtable as a database.
You’ll find many iterations of answers to these same questions here in the Airtable community. Yes, all of this is possible using the REST API, but it takes a bit of wrangling and time :cowboy_hat_face:
We wanted to simplify the problem and completely skip the tedium of working through the nuances of the API. So we wrote up a tutorial on how to easily read from and write to Airtable using our Sync Inc database and proxy.
With SQL, reading data from across your Airtable base (or bases - just ask us how :winking_face: ) is intuitive and fast.
Writing data to Airtable has always been much easier - but with the proxy you no longer need to worry about the last remaining snag — rate limits.
We hope this provides another way for developers to build amazing services and apps on Airtable.
