Replace Airtable

[josh-chamberlain]

Context

Airtable is a great prototyping tool, and a way to show our work publicly for ~free. It's convenient for individual users to interact with. Now that we have a better interface for searching, would we select Airtable as a database management tool? Probably not.

If, without Airtable, we want to make internal tools, we have https://retool.com/

A few more reasons to replace Airtable:

• very limited database size
• clunky API access (not suitable for modern front end)
• we want one source of truth for stuff, fundamentally
• auth/login are tricky, making community interaction/ownership difficult

Things Airtable does for us

Critical for v2:

• [x] API access: https://airtable.com/app473MWXVJVaD7Es/api/docs
• [x] Publicly view database without auth #83
• [x] database admin/editing (achieved with API endpoints)
• [x] https://github.com/Police-Data-Accessibility-Project/data-sources-app/issues/256
  • form here, current public view here
• [ ] UI for editing sources one by one: https://github.com/Police-Data-Accessibility-Project/data-sources-app/issues/163
• [ ] Data Source intake via form: #252
• [ ] Data Source and Requests approval, replaced by Retool workflow: #74

Future:

• [ ] Data Sources edit history or historic snapshots (may be covered by #334)
• [ ] (using CSV editors, WRGL, DoltHub, etc instead is probably fine)
  • we should still be submitting the changes via our API, not direct-to-database
• [ ] Code-free bulk Data Source CSV submission via our API: https://airtable.com/shrbnadIQyefJhI1D
• [ ] CSV export for searches
• [ ] UI for finding + deduplicating duplicates
  • because some URLs contain more than one type of records, we check for dupes on source_url and record_type
• [ ] the in-app ability to link related Data Sources from a Request as an admin (current) or request creator (future)

[DouglasKrouth]

@josh-chamberlain Does this tie into #1 ? If there's interest in migrating from Airtable to Postgres and building a service around it, I'd be happy to look into this.

Sorry to double-dip the issue response if that's the case, just looking for some clarification on this one.

[josh-chamberlain]

@DouglasKrouth yes, but that issue is a bit out of date. We do have an API live. Maybe it's best for you to be in touch with @mbodeantor to see where exactly would be best for you to pitch in. Lots of good work going on, lots of areas in need of help with no one active.

[maxachis]

@josh-chamberlain I have my guess as to some of the reasons, but just to make sure I'm fully in the know, what are our primary motivations for replacing Airtable? What are the disadvantages of using Airtable we're trying to rectify?

[josh-chamberlain]

@maxachis definitely, updated above