How we used Postgres with Softr to help our business teams

Hey Softr community, wanted to share how the company I work for is making Softr more valuable in case it’s helpful to others too. We are using Softr mainly for internal tools but I think this would be helpful for any use case if your company has a database.

We use Postgres to hold our data but customer service and sales wanted to build tools for their teams, and since they’re not engineers they didn’t have access to data they needed in Postgres, and felt more comfortable in Airtable (which is why they pushed for Softr).

At first we tried getting the engineering team to connect Airtable and Postgres but the syncs kept breaking. We tried working with the Airtable API and BaseQL but it wasn’t a good long term solution.

Zapier does work. But it didn’t catch deletes or certain updates. If you’re looking to send only new records and send data in one direction, I’d use Zapier.

Bracket worked really well. It sends data from Postgres to Airtable (whether it’s an update, delete, anything), and it sends data from Airtable back to Postgres. So when customer service or sales team members made updates in our Softr apps, those changes were logged in Airtable and then sent to the rest of the business (because it was sent to Postgres). I made some fields only sync one way so that they couldn’t just change any data in the database.

Bracket does work with Google Sheets and other databases (SQL & NoSQL) too but I haven’t tested the product with those. I’d imagine it works similarly though.

I tried some ETL solutions but it didn’t work well for this use case and seemed like overkill.

Hope this helps!

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@kevingorne thanks a lot for sharing the use case! we are excited to see teams using Softr for internal cases and trying none trivial use cases :slight_smile:

We do plan to also integrate with DBs like (Postgres, MySQL, … Rest API) if the integration would be there would you go for a direct DB connection ?

I use DataFetcher for a similar use case. In my case it’s fetching data from a GraphQL API instead of from another database, but conceptually it’s “get data from a foreign system into Airtable so Softr apps can use it.”

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Would love to see a direct MySQL integration. We’re already having to plan on how to deal with AT limits. As we are now, we’ll have to archive every 6 to 9 months, which would not be a pleasant experience for our clients.

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