[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) - A new UI and editor ...
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Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) - A new UI and editor for your
database
Hi HN - we are Brandon and Brayden (confusing we know), and we are
building Outerbase (https://www.outerbase.com) a better interface
for your databases. Think Google Sheets or Airtable, but on your
relational database. We provide a collaborative UI on top of
Postgres, MySQL and other databases, enabling teams to view, edit
and visualize their data. Here's our short demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38RslBYdZnk Accessing data is a
challenge to team members who aren't data analysts or engineers.
Databases are usually locked down to a few team members, and
everybody else has to rely on them to get access. Most non-
engineers can't (and don't want to) use developer tools, and
developers don't want to write SQL for teammates all day. Technical
employees end up being bottlenecks for access to data. In some
cases this can be extreme--we've seen publicly traded companies
with only 2 data scientists for the whole org! Our goal is to make
data accessible to everyone who needs it. We have an intuitive
spreadsheet-like editor that sits on top of your databases, as well
as the capability to save and share queries. You can take those
queries to create charts and dashboards for your team. You can also
query your data using EZQL, our natural-language-to-SQL conversion.
We use OpenAI to power the natural language process, and we pass
the relational schema on top so we can easily know the
relationships between your tables. Prior to starting Outerbase, I
(Brandon) was a product designer at DigitalOcean and noticed that
while DO did a good job making it simple to create databases, there
wasn't a modern solution to manage them afterwards. Often users had
to use PHPMyAdmin, psql, or $insertDBGUIHere, and to be honest most
of them do not provide the best user experience. They're for a very
technical audience, and fall short of making data accessible for
everyone. We saw a need to do for data what DigitalOcean did with
the droplet. Brayden led an engineering team at Walmart and dealt
with data at a completely different scale. He led the iOS, Android,
and web teams for their amends experience and a lot of time was
spent pulling, querying, and generating reports on that data. So
when we talked about building this he was immediately in. How it
works: We have a React-based frontend that uses a combination of
Sequelize and some native libraries to normalize the underlying
SQL, which allows us to query and connect to different relational
databases. Currently we support Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake,
BigQuery, and Redshift. We don't store any of your end data--
everything else is encrypted and all credentials are stored in KMS.
Tools like Outerbase make it possible for people to do their jobs
more directly. One of our larger customers uses us as a way to
moderate what gets posted to their app. Users submit data and our
customer will actually go in and mark a column approved if the
content is ok for their audience. Outerbase is available to use
today. You can try it for free with 1 user and then if you want to
collaborate or use additional features you can upgrade to our pro
tier or the obligatory "call us" enterprise tier. We would love to
hear your thoughts on the product, you can sign up today for free,
use the sandbox database or connect your own! We know the space
isn't exactly uncrowded, but we hope our approach to building
something that is intuitive and collaborative will make it easier
for everyone to access their data. We know some HN users are not
our target audience because they're technical and already have
tools they're comfortable with--but even then you might want a tool
so your team doesn't have to bug you as much with data requests! We
let you simply give them read access to their db and enable them to
do their own queries. We'd love to hear your views, opinions,
experiences about this. What would you want to see from a
database/data visualization tool? Looking forward to discussion in
the comments!
Author : burcs
Score : 180 points
Date : 2023-03-16 17:23 UTC (1 days ago)
| inssein wrote:
| Oh man I kind of built something like this. I took the project
| down because I got semi-burned out while also having a full time
| job. I have a video still up at https://github.com/aidmin-
| io/docs. Feedback on HN was that companies wouldn't trust it
| unless they could run it in their own infra, but clearly there is
| a huge need with BaseDash and now another similar company funded
| by YC.
|
| HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26853339
| burcs wrote:
| I love this! You should definitely bring it back to life, but
| fully understand the side-project burnout, that's what lead us
| to build this full-time haha.
|
| Completely understand the running on own-infra it's something
| we offer our enterprise customers as it's a bigger lift on our
| end as well.
|
| Happy to hop on a call or zoom or whatever to chat through all
| the challenges we ran into while building this, would love to
| hear more about aidmin as well!
| ushakov wrote:
| Why not restart your project? What are you scared of? HN
| comments? No funding?
|
| As an open-source solution you can a have higher chance of
| succeeding and a higher retention rate than proprietary ones.
| You can raise a seed round just as they did
|
| Feel free to e-mail me, I have sold a open-source startup in
| the past and co-founded another last year
| inssein wrote:
| I think this was sort of the key issue, it wasn't open
| source, but the docs / website was. Have been thinking of
| cleaning it up and open sourcing it.
| ushakov wrote:
| Didn't notice there were no sources in the repository, but
| yes, try again!
| go_prodev wrote:
| In an earlier comment you mentioned evolving into a BI
| dashboarding tool. I'm interested to learn more about this
| roadmap and how you'd differentiate yourself from Power BI and
| Tableau?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Our thinking behind BI, we believe, is quite different than how
| we think Power BI, Looker, and Tableau look at the problem.
|
| Today's large tools require in-depth specialized knowledge on
| the data as well as how to apply it to create dashboards. Our
| mission is to create data tools that non-developers can
| understand, use, and create impact with on day 1.
|
| One feature we're really excited about is how to hold a
| conversation with your database to fine tune the chart you want
| in natural language, and have "verified" sources come in to
| double check what has been produced meets the expectations of
| the business. Certainly a lot more things on the way as well.
| woollyhat wrote:
| Do you intend to offer an on-premise version of your product?
|
| From a data security perspective, I would be very wary about
| granting access to our company databases to an online service
| such as this, but much more comfortable hosting it internally.
| burcs wrote:
| Right now this is a feature we are offering enterprise sized
| contracts. We have talked a lot about offering a self-hosted
| version for others as well though.
|
| Completely understand the concerns around data security, that's
| not something we take lightly at all. We have other ways of
| accessing VPCs without having to poke holes in your network as
| well, including private links, VPN connections, and VPC-to-VPC
| peering.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| - Fantastic concept, looks absolutely promising! - I never do
| monthly subscriptions! - I never do Mac-only! - SQLite missing
| for now (and I wonder how it would be accessed by Outerbase?)
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| Do you generally use Annual Plans or freemium instead? Not the
| author or affiliated with them.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Annual Plans, if I purchase for a customer and only for time
| limited projects.
|
| For myself I purchase only non-expiring licenses with a one-
| time fee. It is absolutely fine if I have to pay again for
| upgrades from time to time, but I want to be able to decide
| to not upgrade and still use my work for another 20 years,
| when the vendor is already forgotten. And provided, I still
| have compatible hardware ;-)
|
| A good example would be Softmaker, which I am happily paying
| for (but they also nag me every other day, if I wouldn't
| rather like to switch to subscription).
| burcs wrote:
| Appreciate that! So we do have a web app, that you can utilize
| from anywhere, some have even used their phones, not sure I
| recommend that experience yet though haha. I need to optimize
| it more.
|
| SQLite should work, I just want to test it more before
| launching. If you'd be interested in beta testing that with me
| would love to chat more!
| ushakov wrote:
| Can this connect to private/internal databases?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Currently we allow databases to whitelist our IP address and
| access from anywhere.
|
| For internal databases we do offer VPN and on-prem (Dockerized)
| solutions for our enterprise customers.
|
| Private databases that are on localhost we don't _currently_
| support on our native Mac app but it's on our roadmap!
| ushakov wrote:
| Downloaded your "native Mac app"
|
| Turns out it's just Electron
|
| Disappointed. Will stick to TablePlus
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah I get it. We wanted to get a local version out there
| as it's what a lot of people want, but as you can imagine a
| full native mac app takes a ton of time to deliver.
|
| We thought Electron would be a nice interim until we go
| down the route further.
|
| I know Electron doesn't get a lot of love, is it the file
| size, the UX, or what about it makes it less desirable for
| you?
| bilalq wrote:
| FWIW, I'm part of the audience that doesn't mind Electron
| apps. The reality is that there just wouldn't be as many
| native cross-platform apps without it. Connecting to a DB
| running on localhost is something I'd absolutely want to
| be able to do here (it even addresses access to private
| network DBs since local tunnels can be setup), and a
| webapp wouldn't be able to deliver on that. I don't care
| if it's "full native" or not, so long as it delivers
| value.
|
| To add on to that, it has _not_ been my experience that
| fully native apps are guaranteed to be better quality.
| SequelPro /SequelAce are native, but they definitely feel
| clunkier than a lot of electron apps. Maybe it's more
| efficient in RAM and CPU, but when the bulk of the
| computation happens remotely, I don't really care.
|
| As a potential user, I'd much rather you spend your time
| delivering support for connecting to DBs on localhost.
| ushakov wrote:
| I understand. The issue was with your communication
|
| In the comment above you told you have a "native Mac
| app". I almost got excited only to discover it's
| Electron, argh
|
| Maybe next time you shouldn't use "native" when it's
| clearly not native. Just to set expectations right
| s1k3s wrote:
| Love the pitch video, absolutely nails it. I'd go even further
| and remove the SQL stuff from down below. It seems like you're
| trying to cater to a non-technical audience, for whom those might
| be confusing (as a tech guy I'd never use this really anyway). I
| don't like that there's no self-hosted version, but I guess you
| guys know your market better.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions.
|
| For the SQL stuff being displayed, we like that it gives non-
| technical users an opportunity to learn SQL along the way. Now
| providing it as an optional UI is a worthy consideration for us
| to perhaps make.
|
| We do have a self-hosted version on our enterprise offering
| currently but I understand it might not be the most desirable
| for non-enterprise customers.
| aarondia wrote:
| Congrats on the launch Brandon + Brayden. I'm building something
| similar over at Mito (https://www.trymito.io), although we're
| Python first instead of SQL first. Would love to hop on a call
| and learn more!
| burcs wrote:
| This looks great! Send an email to brandon [at] outerbase [dot]
| com and we can find some time to chat.
| foxbee wrote:
| This looks very interesting. Who do you think is your target
| user? Why did you not decide to go down the open source route -
| not being critical, just curious.
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah we have gone back and forth a lot about the open-source
| route, and still talk about it frequently. Our target audience
| is non-technical team members so the thought of open-sourcing
| didn't make a ton of sense from that standpoint.
|
| However, it does make sense for their technical team members to
| launch this for them and give them access to the data.
| cwg218 wrote:
| Exciting news!
| kgodey wrote:
| Congratulations on launching! I run an open source project
| solving similar problems, and would love to compare notes
| sometime.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Absolutely. Feel free to reach out to us and we would love to
| connect & compare notes :)
| gverrilla wrote:
| I've been working for 3 years now in a deep tech startup in the
| agriculture space: we have developed a model, and are running
| tests with big companies. We rely on a MySQL db for parameters.
| The core team is me, and 2 of my partners. They are both experts
| in the field, and don't have much experience with computers, let
| alone MySQL. Throughout the development of the project, they need
| to dig into the database to generate reports and also tweak the
| numbers - it happens all the time. We love your video demo, and
| would love to use something like this instead of SQL + MySQL
| Workbench, but there are 2 problems:
|
| 1) We are bootstrapping, with low resources, and no income:
| paying for something like this is not an option - not even if it
| was 1/10 of the current price.
|
| 2) As I said we have data from big companies, so it would only be
| viable if we could do it all locally (not even sure if that's
| possible).
|
| With you current business model I think you might perhaps lose a
| lot of opportunities like us.
|
| Also, it might be a noob question, but it's not clear if we can
| use this to EDIT data aswell, directly. It's a bit of a pain in
| Workbench: for instance, if you don't have an AI PK, it won't
| allow you to edit data after a select statement.
| cpursley wrote:
| Why not start with charging your customers? Just because you
| don't doesn't mean your vendors shouldn't.
| gverrilla wrote:
| The product is still under development and testing, so there
| is no charging for now.
|
| I didn't suggest they shouldn't charge: but if they had a
| more flexible model, perhaps free for 2 or 3 users (most
| single-founder startups fail, anyway), with limitations, we
| would try/use it. And if we did, when we grew we would have
| it in our work culture already.
| danap wrote:
| I had a tool like this, or course without ML. It was called
| Ajqvue. There is still a clone/fork over at GitHub. Worked on
| it for over ten years. Was created by myself to use for testing
| access to database while developing UI for inventory database
| management system with accounting also built in.
|
| It really evolved into a UI to get the common users off the
| back of the db admins.
|
| https://github.com/csanyipal/ajqvue/
|
| 1) Open Source 2) Data Access Locally and Remote
|
| docs/ has Manual, have somewhere videos.
|
| Outerbase seems to finally get to solutions that were just
| lacking in alot of past UIs. Well I guess, Tableau, but gone
| now. Problem it just takes alot to get a decent one, that
| functions, and in my opinion now everyone thinks tech tool
| solutions are a web UI base.
|
| Ajqvue was not.
|
| danap.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| You should try NocoDB!
| gverrilla wrote:
| Thanks a lot, will give it a try!
| friendzis wrote:
| > Accessing data is a challenge to team members who aren't data
| analysts or engineers
|
| To me it seems that the product is more or less built around this
| notion. Which is weird. In my experience, unless there are strict
| reasons why one cannot have access to raw data, access is usually
| one approval away.
|
| > we pass the relational schema on top so we can easily know the
| relationships between your tables.
|
| Take a look at any production database that has survived a decade
| of continuous development. It's batshit crazy. There will be 3
| different tokens in field names denoting the very same thing.
| Some relationships will be defined in the schema, some in
| procedures, some in application code. Values will be
| scaled/encoded differently in tables from different generations.
| Quite possibly there will be "read only" tables of historical
| data following entirely different schema. What does null value
| field mean in EAV table? It may mean absence of value (how is it
| different from absence of the attribute?), explicit
| inapplicability of the attribute or `any` value.
|
| Not including any of these quirks returns _wrong_ data, but it
| does not tell you and it is not always obvious that the data is
| incorrect. Validating complex queries is not that easy. For most
| business questions wrong data is strictly worse than no data.
|
| IIUC, Outerbase connects directly to the database, takes a
| dataset that does not easily yield to simple join-and-filter
| composition, writes a query without incorporating all the data
| quirks and spits it out to a rather rudimentary sql explorer.
| That is one of the major reasons why read only access to raw data
| is restricted in the first place. The value proposition here is
| murky to say the least - it does not take much training to teach
| someone to write rudimentary selects.
|
| But if companies take the resources to make data easily
| analyzable and build a data warehouse, they want to use powerful
| reporting tool like PowerBI or Tableau. Outerbase seems to fall
| very short here.
|
| So, where in the team does Outerbase fit? Support and business
| people need data pre-validated to be correct, DBAs hand-optimize
| queries. Devs either work with some form of ORM/DAO or write
| composable queries that need a very specific structure anyway.
| emptysea wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Tableplus but always interested in new
| developments in this space.
|
| Mongo Atlas has a really great database editor / UI built into
| their web UI but ofc it's Mongo only.
|
| Curious if you have plans to support connecting to a database
| over SSH? I have a database running on a VM and I can connect to
| via an SSH tunnel. Avoids having to expose the database to the
| internet.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Yes, great question! We do have support for connecting to
| databases over SSH on our very near term release roadmap.
| Avoiding exposing databases to the internet is a common theme
| we hear and is important for us to tackle quickly.
| marban wrote:
| Last time MongoDB Compass crashed on my Mac, a Firefox log came
| up -- Seems like they've repacked FF into a standalone app.
| pffft8888 wrote:
| ChatGPT4 can generate the sql for whatever query, and it can
| create the schema and modify it.
|
| How do you position agains near-future ChatGPT based tools for
| working with data/databases?
| hodanli wrote:
| as far as i understood they already use gpt3
| colesantiago wrote:
| Great launch guys!
|
| What is the difference between Retool, Basedash and Outerbase
| other than they are all funded by YC?
| burcs wrote:
| Great question! Our focus is making data easily accessible for
| your team rather than building out internal dashboards.
|
| I'm a big fan of Retool and Basedash and love what they have
| done, but there's still some initial learnings there to build
| those experiences, where we want to enable users to come in and
| immediately see their data and start interacting with it.
|
| I see a future where we end up replacing more traditional BI
| tools rather than internal tools, if that makes sense?
| systems wrote:
| what is basedash, and what is "an admin panel", i visited their
| site and google for like 10 minutes and still no clue what this
| is
|
| retool is a rad platfrom, i found it when i was looking for an
| MS lightswitch replacement, so its clear what it is
|
| also outerbase is a bit strange, its a cloud db interface and
| the download link is for mac (not windows, mac) , the use cases
| seem very particular (niche) to me
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah we had a windows version as well, it was a bit buggy so
| we decided to launch without it.
|
| I'm curious why does use case sound niche? We love to think
| that giving everyone access to data is a pretty big challenge
| to solve. Is it in our messaging or do you think the overall
| vision is off? Would love to understand how we could be more
| clear in what we are providing.
| systems wrote:
| the market is huge, different people need different things
| making a cloud app is not niche, the mac only client was a
| bit unusual
|
| for internal apps, moving to the cloud is a big step for
| most places i worked in, its a huge step
|
| I just find it striking, that its considered as a casual
| thing or the norm, nowadays
|
| I think maybe you might want to explain on your site, why
| puting your internal db on the cloud is safe, easy ... and
| not a big deal
| maxmusing wrote:
| Basedash founder here. We're much more focused on admin panels
| that you would give to non-technical teammates (e.g. support,
| ops, sales) to view & edit data. Less around data analysis and
| charts, though we have a bit of that. We're also not limited to
| databases, you can set up actions to hit APIs (e.g. Stripe,
| SendGrid, internal APIs).
| debarshri wrote:
| Hey guys. I am not sure but you might have a security issue or a
| bug where in anyone can access the database page without login
| [1]. It give me link to logout and stuff but keeps through
| errors. UI breaks here too when click on members [2]
|
| [1] https://app.outerbase.com/databases
|
| [2] https://app.outerbase.com/settings
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Thanks for the call out here on this bug!
|
| We are working on a resolution to this issue right now. This is
| an issue with our logout function on the frontend not removing
| the auth token. There is no risk of scope access outside of
| your machine.
|
| We will push out a fix shortly.
|
| EDIT: Fix has been deployed. Thanks again!
| typosaur wrote:
| It appears like your fix didn't work
|
| It now just redirects to the auth page. Clicked on the back
| button in my browser and _voila_
|
| https://imgur.com/a/EvMaVu9
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Hmm I wonder if this is a caching issue. It seems to be
| working on our part and no data is ever loaded. If you'd be
| willing to talk through a bit further I'd love to. brayden
| [at] outerbase [dot] com.
| CamJN wrote:
| Assuming you use a token similar to JWT , then redirects
| and removing the token from the client don't matter if
| you don't blacklist the token on the backend, which if
| they were able to continue by hitting the back button
| seems the case. This does require you to keep a database
| of "logged-out" tokens and reject them, and occasionally
| run a cleanup script on the db to prune tokens from that
| table after they would have expired, but that's what is
| required when you use auth tokens for login.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Appreciate your taking the time to give us this
| suggestion -- but to clarify, we do revoke the token :D
|
| From the screenshot that was provided, they're seeing the
| client render a page, but it's failing to acquire any
| data from the API. If they opened the network inspector
| they'd likely see that the requests are 401'ing after
| logging out.
|
| I'm not pretending that this is good UX -- it's not --
| but it's not evidence of a security issue. That said, we
| have every intention of nailing down fantastic UX as
| quickly as possible. (I'm a recent addition to the
| company but) it pains me personally for anyone to see any
| mistakes and I hope to impress you soon.
| [deleted]
| krishadi wrote:
| Just some thoughts on it. The op initally talks about data
| warehouses, but then in the comments they talk about production
| db. So, I am not sure if I completely understand the problem
| statement:
|
| 1. Why would you want to do data analytics on a production
| database? There is a reason why data warehouses exists. And you
| don't want to block your production databases for someone from
| the business team to run a query. 2. If you'd want to change
| something in your prod-db, I wouldn't give that permission to a
| non-technical person. Do they know about the schema thats
| implemented? data types? 3. If it's just analytics on data
| warehouses, there are plenty of db visualization tools out there,
| the so called BI tools. There are plenty, I mean too many out
| there. In different flavours. What makes this different?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Looks promising, and approaching the quality of Panic's Mac
| products.
|
| But then I saw it's subscriptionware. Nope. I don't use
| subscriptionware for my personal computing. And the billion-
| dollar healthcare company I work for doesn't do software
| subscription unless you're Microsoft, or similarly indispensable.
| Startups need not apply.
|
| At least the pricing is clear and mostly visible, except for the
| enterprise tier. Much better than most subscription offerings
| these days that have even the lowest tiers locked behind a phone
| call.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Yeah but startups aren't going to make billion dollar
| valuations selling to you (or me) anyway. Subscriptions are for
| enterprises.
| rytill wrote:
| Can you describe how this software could sustainably be
| developed to serve you, and where you would fit in to that
| ecosystem?
|
| How would someone who makes software to help you interact with
| your database and write queries using AI buy food and pay rent,
| if they didn't already have money?
|
| Are you implying that if their software was open source, with a
| self-hostable version, you would use that, and contribute back
| to the community, which would provide them some service value?
| bachmeier wrote:
| > How would someone who makes software to help you interact
| with your database and write queries using AI buy food and
| pay rent, if they didn't already have money?
|
| Just FYI, many companies sell software at less than
| $600/user/year.
| akho wrote:
| By selling perpetual per-seat licenses and an integration
| contract, same as everybody else who works with corporations.
| It's not exactly novel. Software existed before
| subscriptions.
|
| I don't think the GP comment mentioned open source in any
| way.
| burcs wrote:
| First off, that might be the best compliment I have received, I
| love Panic and all that they do.
|
| I hear you, you can use us for free if you are a personal user.
| Meaning one connection, 5 saved queries, and a one dashboard.
| However, we want to be able to support users as they scale with
| their queries our expenses add up too. I hope you understand!
| e12e wrote:
| What is "the app for Mac"? As i understand from other comments,
| it's not, in fact, on premise?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| The Mac app that's referenced is our downloadable Electron
| application for Mac's. The alternative is to use Outerbase via
| our website.
|
| In terms of serving Outerbase on-prem, it's an enterprise
| offering we do support.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > Introducing EZQL
|
| We soon have covered all kinds of flavours on SQL
| cmbothwell wrote:
| From a quick glance this could be the missing piece for going all
| in on SQLite for small apps. Most plug-in admins only work with
| remotely accesible databases like Postgres.
|
| How would that work, does Outerbase run locally on my server
| instance?
|
| If it had some functionality for backups and a nice Auth story it
| could really be a good side project secret weapon.
| burcs wrote:
| Hey sorry I missed this one earlier, so right now it doesn't
| work locally, but definitely something we're exploring.
|
| Also how would you want backups to work? Would you want us to
| store those for you? Or I guess if it was local would you want
| them to be stored on your machine at X interval?
| wackget wrote:
| "Delete account" doesn't work. Neither does updating email.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Noted, we'll take a look into this. Thanks for bringing to our
| attention!
| mediaman wrote:
| Regarding pricing: do you offer monthly subscriptions for "view-
| only" users?
|
| Here's my use-case. I am fine paying $50 a month for someone to
| make dashboards, create queries, etc.
|
| However, that's too much (and significantly above other tools)
| for the "users" of the product: for example, salespeople who I
| would like to enable to see what products their customers have
| used. I'd expect something in the 10-20 range per head per month
| for them, in exchange for more limited functionality.
|
| Some companies solve for this by charging for "creators"
| (dashboard designers, the people who set up the database
| connection, or run more custom queries) versus viewers. This
| encourages broader adoption within a company. $50/mo for any type
| of user is pretty steep.
| burcs wrote:
| Great point -- I love the idea of creators vs viewers.
|
| We are looking into building out a view-only mode that would be
| much more affordable. Potentially even embedded experiences so
| you could share reports internally without needing to actually
| log into Outerbase.
|
| Would that solve your use case?
| mediaman wrote:
| Yes, a view-only mode would work. Ideally it would not just
| be a static view, but would allow users to run some queries
| (perhaps constrained?) on the table, so they can get a list
| of their customers who ordered last quarter but not this
| quarter, for example, or other similar queries.
|
| But disallowing them from modifying the DB would be fine.
|
| Maybe limiting it to tables established by the Creator, and
| with a certain View/Dashboard arrangement, would work.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Potentially even embedded experiences so you could share
| reports internally without needing to actually log into
| Outerbase.
|
| Not OP, but this reminds me of Heroku Dataclips and I think
| you should strongly consider such a product feature.
|
| https://blog.heroku.com/how-dataclips-power-insights-at-
| hero...
|
| EDIT: Tremendous! Thanks for the reply!
| burcs wrote:
| One of our founding developers may or may not have helped
| build that out at Heroku hahaha. Definitely on the roadmap!
| danpalmer wrote:
| We hit this pricing issue with almost every tool we used at one
| point or another. Tools that are priced for someone who uses it
| every day, but where the value comes from having open access
| for many people who might use it once a month.
| mousetree wrote:
| This is the major problem we have with Retool. We have a
| handful of creators and hundreds of end-users (customer
| service, sales) where we're paying $50 each. Will inevitably
| tip the balance back to building these high usage apps by hand.
| kulikalov wrote:
| This is great! Thanks for BigQuery integration, I was passively
| looking for an alternative interface. Looking forward to try it.
| Possible feature request (not sure if you have it) - BigQuery
| creates temporary tables after each query run. When exploring the
| data it would be super cool to write queries sequentially by
| using those temporary tables. I do it in BigQuery UI, but it's
| quite tedious.
| bsid wrote:
| Connected my database and it's not showing anything, also no
| error messages in the UI, some 406s in the dev console. would be
| interested to try it out
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Good to know! Can take a look at the fact no error messages
| were surfaced to help identify the problem. If you want to hop
| on a call together and figure out the issue email me at -
| brayden [at] outerbase [dot] com - and I'm happy to hop on and
| get this working for you.
| bsid wrote:
| update: user error on my part, thanks for the help!
| chrisgat wrote:
| Same here. Trying to connect to a local db if that matters.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| At the moment we only support hosted databases and nothing
| from the local machine but we are working on adding support
| for this really soon! It's been much requested.
| samanator wrote:
| Will this be the interface that I need?
|
| Mathesar ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999774 ) was
| the last one I tried out but it couldn't support more than 250k
| rows without crashing and required foreign keys in order to infer
| relationships. Otherwise it's exactly what I want. An
| Excel/Airtable interface around a raw database connection.
|
| How does Outerbase compare?
|
| Edit:
|
| Mistypes
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We hope that it is the interface that you need!
|
| To be entirely candid and honest, returning a lot of rows
| presents problems on our end as well at the moment. It's
| something we are actively working on improving for large data
| sets to create the best user experience without having to
| concern yourself about what you're returning.
|
| For our EZQL (natural language to SQL) you don't necessarily
| need to have foreign keys to infer relationships between
| tables. We try to infer those relationships for you.
| kgodey wrote:
| Mathesar core team member here. I don't want to distract from
| Outerbase's launch, but if you have time, would you be able to
| open an issue for the crash at
| https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar? We're still in alpha
| and relying on people checking out the project to report
| problems like these so we can fix them.
|
| Also, relationships without foreign keys is on our roadmap:
| https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/2276
| samanator wrote:
| Sure! I'll file it this weekend.
| owenwil wrote:
| This is awesome--I love that you're building a tool that makes
| something that was previously scoped to a 'developer' tool
| available for regular users. Something like this for querying
| internal data would be a gamechanger for folks who struggle with
| SQL but need user insights!
| burcs wrote:
| Thank you - it definitely scratched an itch of mine. I knew my
| way around a lot of the compute from working at DigitalOcean
| but wanted to make accessing data/databases easier!
| samanator wrote:
| I'm running postgres on docker on an ec2 instance and outerbase
| lets me save the connection but doesn't show any schemas or let
| me query any tables.
|
| I've checked and double checked firewalls to make sure the IP is
| whitelisted. I'm able to connect with the same setup from my
| personal computer via psql (with the only difference being the ip
| whitelisted)by whitelisting it.
|
| Hope you get this working or add some improved connection
| diagnosist mechanism.
|
| Edit:
|
| If it helps, a POST request to
|
| https://app.outerbase.com/api/v1/workspace/39b72940-083d-4aa...
|
| Fails with a 503 response of > The server does not support SSL
| connections
|
| ... But it's not an SSL connection. I provided a plain ip
| address.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We are looking into this. Apologies for the issue. Plain IP
| addresses should work no problem. If it helps to connect and
| debug together feel free to send me an email at - brayden [at]
| outerbase [dot] com.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| I'm sorry but the pricing here is off by like an order of
| magnitude. This is in the $5/mo category not the $50/user/mo
| category.
|
| Maybe I'm not the target user.
|
| Please take this as me trying to help. I think many many other
| users are thinking this but not saying because they know they
| will get 500 downvotes.
|
| You're saying the value provided is 4x the entire Microsoft Suite
| + OneDrive + Exchange (for example).
|
| Seems really, really expensive to me
| gizmo wrote:
| This comparison doesn't work. Businesses are happy to pay for
| software that addresses a pain point. If people balk at
| 50/user/month it can mean one of three things: the product
| isn't good enough, the customer doesn't need the product, or
| the customers are so broke they can be safely ignored.
|
| Startups in the very beginning need to find their core
| customers. If you price too low the voices of hobbyists and
| unserious people will drown out the voices of your actual
| customers. If you're not careful that's fatal for your startup.
| eirikbakke wrote:
| Products like Microsoft Office, OneDrive, and Exchange are
| commoditized--their price has been driven down, over many
| years, by competition, and profit happens only at volume. So
| these products can't really follow the "value-based pricing"
| principle.
| indymike wrote:
| > This is in the $5/mo category not the $50/user/mo category.
|
| The pricing here is in line with other DB management tools.
| He's competing with things like Preset (a hosted Apache
| Superset), DataGrip (JetBrains SQL IDE), and so on.
|
| > You're saying the value provided is 4x the entire Microsoft
| Suite + OneDrive + Exchange (for example).
|
| If you work with data a lot, the answer is a resounding yes.
| Email, storage and word processing has a larger target market
| and is actually quite competitive despite Google and
| Microsoft's large marketshare (LibreOffice, Zoho, Kingsoft,
| Dropboxish stuff, Proton Mail, etc...)
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| This is strong evidence that I am not the user & the pricing
| may indeed stack up.
|
| A good response for sure.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Actually looking into it - I still think it's way off.
|
| Looking at DataGrip for example, it's only cost comparable
| if you want the ultra-comprehensive version for connecting
| to multiple database types (otherwise it's 3x more
| expensive).
|
| And DataGrip is clearly only intended for professional
| DBA's or something close. This is intended to business-
| users.
|
| There's also going to be crazy price pressure from GPT4
| tools in this segment. Like justifying why having a UI is
| better and why it should be 10x more expensive all at once.
|
| I think there's a systemic issue here: YC strongly advises
| raising prices, etc. but it's just hit almost a satirical
| level. (Launch with MVP-ish features, less distribution
| advantages, but aim for slightly-premium pricing vs the
| proven competitors with 500 integrations and 10 years of
| development).
| indymike wrote:
| Could be, but if you look at Preset, you are dealing with
| honestly a parity product as far as I can tell.
|
| > There's also going to be crazy price pressure from GPT4
| tools in this segment.
|
| Not really, error rate must = 0 for database tools.
| slotrans wrote:
| "Databases are usually locked down to a few team members..."
|
| Not true in my experience. True at very large / very mature
| companies, but at any <5-year-old company the DB will be widely
| accessible, perhaps universally so. Certainly every engineer,
| every analyst, and every manager will have full access. (I'm sure
| someone will pipe in to disagree but this has been true for 10
| out of the last 10 companies I've worked with). Coming from
| DigitalOcean and Walmart it's not surprising you would make this
| mistake, not trying to dunk just want to suggest this might not
| be as big of a problem as you think.
|
| In that same vein, in a small company environment you don't
| harass engineers with query requests, you _learn SQL_. I 've seen
| hundreds of non-technical users do this (and helped many of
| them), it's not unusual. Visual query-building tools never help.
| Even good interfaces like Looker, on top of carefully-crafted
| data warehouses (which most won't have) are still vastly inferior
| to SQL and so analysts don't use them. Again, just trying to
| suggest the problem may not be what you think.
|
| Generating queries with a language model won't work. Real data is
| far messier than you expect. The table names and field names will
| not be as literal as you need them to be, and half the database
| will come with "special instructions" (like "oh you need to
| divide that field by 100 because...") that will not be inferrable
| from the names or the data. Many DBs will _completely_ lack
| foreign keys or consistent key naming. There will often be
| epochal "eras" in the data where everything before YYYY-MM-DD
| worked like X, and after that it's Y, and the value of that date
| is recorded nowhere.
|
| "Currently we support Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, and
| Redshift."
|
| I know Java isn't hip but consider relying on JDBC for DB access.
| There are more DBs out there than you can imagine, and 100% of
| them support JDBC. Otherwise there will always be some DB you're
| not supporting, and adding that support will be costly.
|
| Anyway just some food for thought. Good luck. (about me: 18 years
| in data & analytics)
| zie wrote:
| I agree with everything, but will push back about everyone
| having access to everything.. I hope that's mostly read-only or
| at least a very robust auditing/logging strategy employed.
|
| At $WORK, we give basically every employee a DB role in
| Postgres, but we use table/row level access control(s) and most
| can only see their own records, or the records of their
| employees(if they are a manager). We encourage them to learn
| SQL(most don't). We also do strong audit/logging
| controls(essentially pg_audit) so we track every DB change,
| forever.
|
| Otherwise I completely agree with you that data is almost
| always quite messy. I can't imagine their EZSQL stuff would
| work on our data at all. We have tried various other data
| finding magic stuff, and all of it without fail is basically
| useless once attached to real data that has lived in the wild
| for a while(we have data back to the 1990's in our database).
| itake wrote:
| All of my jobs big (1k+ engineers) and small (me), the BE
| engineers had read access to most databases. The larger
| companies have some access controls, but if you needed access,
| it was almost always given.
| debarshri wrote:
| Would you mind chat about how you guys manage access? We are
| building something in the access management space. Would love
| to get some feedback!
| itake wrote:
| At Grab, we have an internally built system (that I think
| is backed by Active Directory and leverages experience from
| ppl from okta).
|
| As a "requestor", I choose from a list of services, then I
| select which role I want, then there are meta attributes
| (like which country's data I want to access, etc.). This
| then lets me oAuth into the internal app with a JWT. My
| access is time limited (max of 90 days or only 2 hours).
|
| As a data owner and EM, I approve requests for services and
| data that I own.
|
| As an service creator, I have to register the service in
| the tool, provide all of my various roles and
| configurations.
|
| This system works with both internal and external
| authorizations. Like if I need prod AWS write access.
|
| It doesn't cover all data (some tools have similar
| internally built systems), but we will eventually migrate
| everything to it.
|
| This is probably all I have time to share.
| burcs wrote:
| That's a fair comment, If anything them not being locked down
| makes access to databases easier to connect to Outerbase.
|
| I agree that users should learn SQL, even when you use EZQL it
| returns the actual SQL in a fully-editable IDE that can be
| modified in whatever way you would want.
|
| Do you think that the existing tools out there provide a good
| environment for those non-technical teams to learn SQL?
|
| Maybe I'm biased but I have never been a huge fan of accessing
| data from the majority of the existing tools as they feel
| outdated and like tools built mostly for engineers.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > Do you think that the existing tools out there provide a
| good environment for those non-technical teams to learn SQL?
|
| I dunno. There are a truly extraordinary number of people
| I've worked with who query sql by going in to SSMS, object
| explorer, find table, right click "select top 1000 rows" and
| then fiddling around with the query to get what they want.
|
| Obviously in some schemas this might be useless, but most
| often there are views which cover obvious uses.
| wharfjumper wrote:
| How does this compare to Nocodb, Baserow, and Mathesar?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Great question. The three you've listed have their own great
| use cases as a visual spreadsheet layout for databases.
|
| Some of our features that really help us stand out from this
| particular pack are the fact you can use EZQL in Outerbase to
| ask natural language questions on your database without knowing
| how to query (we'll even expose the SQL if you're interested in
| what was produced, great for learning SQL). Very helpful for
| larger databases. In addition to that you can take these
| queries and create data visualization right in our tool.
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| so outerbox connects directly to the db without using a bridge
| service like Mode does?
|
| meh, i don't want to allow inbound connections from the internet.
|
| i absolutely hate mode, but i liked their bridge connector.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| We are working on providing VPN tunnel connections or VPC-to-
| VPC connections as well, but it's not quite available today.
| Thanks for sharing this concern with us!
| LilyFrenchPants wrote:
| You are going to hit a scaling limit from AWS on the # of VPC
| your org can have and have at the same time.
|
| _LFP_
| Etai wrote:
| Great job with the UI. Looks really clean. One concern many data
| teams might have with this is around how something like verifies
| that the queries are correct before sharing it with the rest of
| the company. Have you thought about a solution for that?
| burcs wrote:
| Really appreciate it!
|
| So right now a user can create a query, save it, and share it
| with their teammate for verification. Their isn't currently a
| more automated workflow to do this, but it is something we are
| definitely exploring.
| brap wrote:
| This is very cool, one usecase I definitely see for this is
| letting PMs get the answers they want without bothering eng.
|
| I would even take this further and hide the SQL altogether, and
| make this accessible via Slack/Teams bot.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| As a PM in a previous life, this is dead on.
|
| I need answers from queries in the DB but I don't have DB
| access and having me write sql queries is a waste of time.
| jrockway wrote:
| I always used Metabase for this.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Maybe the largest core beneficiary from a tool such as
| Outerbase are in fact product teams. That's where we know at
| larger companies pain is felt.
|
| We do have a Slack integration that isn't launched YET but is
| in internal testing to be released soon. Glad to hear this
| feedback and know we're on the right track with thoughts here!
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