I Just saw the announcement about connecting ...

[Christian_Farle]

I Just saw the announcement about connecting to Airtable. That’s great news! thanks for doing this.

A couple of questions off the top of my head:

• Airtable has a per-user pricing model. I am assuming that Appsheet connects as a single user (i.e the app creator) even if we have several named users interacting with the app. Please confirm.

• Could you speak to performance expectations when connecting to an Airtable data source? Would it be better than Google table? Would it resemble an SQL data source? If this resembles the performance of an SQL data source, it would certainly be an incredibly valuable feature, as the Airtable structure is super easy to administer compared to an MySQL database.

Thanks for your help

[pravse]

I can provide some high level answers but @Harry knows the performance details.

Yes, AppSheet connects to Airtable like a database (with a single account).

There are some oddities. Airtable doesn’t expose a metadata interface so we cannot get a list of tables from it. The list has to be explicit specified by you when creating your data source.

[Harry2]

@Christian_Farley2 Hi Christian, each AirTable data source that you add to AppSheet uses an API key from a single AirTable account and is therefore tied to only this account. When connecting to this AirTable data source, AppSheet will connect as a single user (the account that owns the API key) regardless of how many users actually use the AppSheet app.

However, you should note that it is possible to add AirTable data sources that are tied to different AirTable accounts. If you only want to be charged for a single AirTable account, you’ll need to ensure that all of your AirTable data sources are tied to the same AirTable account.

Regarding performance, although AirTable looks and behaves like a SQL data source, it most likely won’t be as fast as one. This is because AirTable is not specifically optimized for fast data transfer, at least for now. Although we will try our best to improve performance on our end, the API provided by AirTable will be the most important determinant of performance. For example, currently every request that AppSheet sends to AirTable through the API can only retrieve at most 100 rows. If there are more than 100 rows in the table, AppSheet will need to send additional requests, which will take up more time.