Hey David - love what you’re doing with Retool. I think it’s a good solution for the front end piece of this challenge. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Retool focus on working with existing enterprise databases and APIs? If so then I think the missing piece is a DBaaS with great guardrails.

Access (and to a lesser extent, Excel) empower anyone to model their data and manipulate it without asking permission. The problem is they don’t scale well, there are no backups, they don’t show up in a data catalog anywhere, no integration with enterprise SSO, etc. They do benefit from file-focused solutions for these issues (eg the Access file lives on a network drive which is backed up) but they fall far short from what you expect from a production database.

So my challenge is: how can I let anyone in my organization create a new database, with all the backup/authentication/discovery/scalability out of the box, for them to connect to Retool?

Half of the point of Access is that it's not in the cloud; it's a locally installed app that doesn't even require network access or admin rights.

Access has had a decent MySQL connector for a long time so the scalability, availability and other network factors can be a non-issue if Access is used purely as a GUI.