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Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by rnavi on Thursday May 27, 2021 @10:47AM (#27303792)
Hey Everybody,

We are really excited to open source NocoDB today.

NocoDB is an open source Airtable alternative.

Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb

NocoDB works by connecting to any relational database and transforming them into a smart spreadsheet interface!

NocoDB currently works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, Amazon Aurora & MariaDB databases.

This allows you to build no-code business solutions collaboratively with teams.

Getting started is simple :

    docker run -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb
    or
    npx create-nocodb-app

Also NocoDB's app store allows you to build business workflows on views with combination of Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Twilio, Whatsapp, Email & any 3rd party APIs too. Plus NocoDB provides programmatic access to APIs so that you can build integrations with Zapier / Integromat and custom applications too.

For storage you can connect to S3, Mini, GCS, Azure, DigitalOcean spaces & any S3 compatible API

NocoDB gives programmatic access to REST & GraphQL APIs. And with our API tokens it can be easily integrated with Zapier / Integromat.

- - - - - -

Also please join our community at :

- Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb

- Discord : https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW

- Twitter : https://twitter.com/nocodb

Would love to hear usecases & feedback.

Thank you,

Team NocoDB

edit : made the comment short :)

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by Abishek_Muthian on Friday May 28, 2021 @01:52AM (#27312144)
I'm very excited, looking at the GitHub stars in just 24 hours after launch it looks like many others are. This looks like a text book example of successful 'Show HN' launch.

So my question is really regarding this launch, rather than NocoDB itself as all pertinent questions regarding it seems to have been asked.

I see you have got some feedback on your website regarding NocoDB after production deployment by some companies, How long you folks have been developing NocoDB? Were you using your personal funds for development?

All the best, Hope NoCoDB turns out to be another successful dual-licensed startup.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by syrusakbary on Thursday May 27, 2021 @08:50PM (#27310521)
This is awesome!! I'm also super excited about this.

You should apply to YCombinator S21 batch! (feel free to use my reference: syrusakbary if you would like!)

https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by tecleandor on Friday May 28, 2021 @07:19AM (#27314036)
Hi!

FYI, I think you are using the wrong logo on Vasyl Rakivnenko testimonial. You using the Spanish Servired (a bank network) logo instead of the Polish Servired (Road Transportation).

I think this is the correct one: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servired-sp-z-o-o-/

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Friday May 28, 2021 @10:55AM (#27316082)
Thanks a tonne, fixed it.
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by Artistry121 on Thursday May 27, 2021 @04:47PM (#27308304)
WOW! I am so excited by this. I'm going to build some nice CRMs and project management tools for my clients - small and growing service businesses - and attempt a cool integration with graphing and Matrix.

This is so important and the opening up of code / databases to non-technical people will create so much value.

Maybe we can work together on it! (I guess, open source means we will be)

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by de6u99er on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:24PM (#27309331)
Looks good in the Github Readme file, but having tested the docker-compose/pg setup via docker-compose I think you still have some work to do. A lot of things result in an error, or are not possible yet.

E.g. I tried a simple example with A country table containing an iso-code and a name, and a company table containing a name and a country. Somehow I can not use the iso code in the company table, I am forced to use the auto-incrementing primary key. I am not able to set iso-code column as unique which would solve my issue.

---------------------------------

The app also has UI problems. E.g. when adding a new row, one the last field edited seems to be still in editing mode since the value is left-bound and not centered like the other values. Only after entering another field the value seems to be recognized as changed and I can save the data.

Clicking on "Swagger apis dock" results in following error message "Cannot GET /nc/testproject_rest_api_HZOx/v1/graphql".

---------------------------------

Having added a few images via attachment column, I noticed that I can access those from a incognito window where I am definitely not logged in.

Steps to reproduce:

1. connect to database container -> docker-compose exec --user postgres xcdb psql

2. connect to database -> \c xcdb

3. list tables -> \d

4. select data from the table with attachments (in my case the company table) -> select * from xa1__company;

5. copy one of the urls and paste it in an incognito tab

---------------------------------

Another issue that I see is that it relies a lot on external libraries, of which this one has been blocked by my ad-blocker --> https://static.hotjar.com/c/hotjar-2297736.js?sv=6

Hotjar seems to be a tool tracking the user interactions with the product -> https://www.hotjar.com/

This is where I stopped evaluating your product LOL

---------------------------------

Clicking on Calendar, Kanban, and Form results in a "Coming soon" message. Which is curious since, your website demonstrates it already.

---------------------------------

Those rules saying delete cascade seem to be nonsense. I was able to delete rows in both tables (country, company) without any cascading happening which would result in an inconsistent state. --> Foreign keys seem only to exist within your applications metamodel and they don't seem to be respected accordingly.

---------------------------------

My final verdict: You have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to bring this into a production ready state. Until then I recommend to others not using it with your production databases, and because of coming with the hotjar user action tracking tool not use and privacy related data with it.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:41PM (#27309487)
Thanks for your report.

With regards to Swagger thing, we allow to create multiple projects within same schema too! And this happens in NC_DB only - I imagine we 've an issue with Swagger related model creation. This should be straight forward.

At row edit part - we will work on your feedback.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by de6u99er on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:52PM (#27309596)
What about the hotjar part and external JS libraries? (I might have edited my previous comment in the meanwhile and you might not have seen it)
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:09PM (#27309740)
Hotjar allows us to ask questionnaire about product. And the idea was to give it and google analytics as plugins so you as a customer can key in your own analytics. Happy to remove it and somebody had raised an issue of jsdeliver related to fonts.
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by de6u99er on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:33PM (#27309922)
I am not an Hotjar expert, but looking right now at the source code of your hotjar.js file it doesn't seem to be per installation but rather one config for all running NocoDBs.

This sections in particular are quite concerning to me:

  window.hjSiteSettings = window.hjSiteSettings || {
    site_id: 2297736,
    r: 1.0,
    rec_value: 0.01,
    state_change_listen_mode: "manual",
    record: true,
    continuous_capture_enabled: false,
    recording_capture_keystrokes: true,
    anonymize_digits: true,
    anonymize_emails: true,
    suppress_all: false,
    suppress_text: false,
    suppress_location: false,
    user_attributes_enabled: false,
    legal_name: null,
    privacy_policy_url: null,
    deferred_page_contents: [

  // all the other code

  window.hjBootstrap(
    "https://script.hotjar.com/",
    "modules.5a9f57d95ecbb1bf1965.js",
    "2297736"
  ),
  (window.hjLazyModules = window.hjLazyModules || {
    FORM_SELECTOR: { js: "form-selector.392b5f4f766aeb35682b.js" },
    SURVEY_V2: { js: "survey-v2.7218c468a82710c2c26b.js" },
    SURVEY_BOOTSTRAPPER: {
      js: "survey-bootstrapper.f41ed221e5747a5a4a7b.js",
    },
    SURVEY_ISOLATED: { js: "survey-isolated.8af10abbd1a5f80490de.js" },
    HEATMAP_SCREENSHOTTER: {
      js: "heatmap-screenshotter.e571353a90a331625bf1.js",
    },
    HEATMAP_VIEWER: { js: "heatmap-viewer.2fb5d2a22502dfdfdac6.js" },
    SURVEY_INVITATION: { js: "survey-invitation.1ae4ed40ba57f9c20afc.js" },
    NOTIFICATION: { js: "notification.5e4044e77b0558775cb4.js" },
    INCOMING_FEEDBACK: { js: "incoming-feedback.2856389193450b0481d4.js" },
    PREACT_INCOMING_FEEDBACK: {
      js: "preact-incoming-feedback.80672cee08360a8c286c.js",
    },
    SENTRY: { js: "sentry.f1958c523a41d4a73968.js" },
  });
It seems to load additional js files like --> https://script.hotjar.com/heatmap-screenshotter.e571353a90a3...

--------------------

Hotjar website has following thing to say:

  > Hotjar should capture the majority of user sessions in Heatmaps and Recordings. We cannot guarantee that a specific user will be tracked.
see: https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011624047-Does-...

--------------------

Can't say if it would have sent data to your hotjar account or not since it was blocked in my browser, but to me this all seems like an involuntary data collection. But again, I am no Hotjar expert. Maybe someone else can chip in here.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by _jal on Thursday May 27, 2021 @01:55PM (#27306020)
Cool, I will be playing with this tonight.

I haven't built a webapp in several years, and was just trying to find a way to offer access to a DB for a non-technical person. After seeing my options for UI were (still!) basically Access and go-build-something, was resigned to losing my weekend to coming back up to speed with Django, but it looks like this should be fine.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @02:38PM (#27306505)
>> Was just trying to find a way to offer access to a DB for a non-technical person

Yes, you can say we are advanced version of MS Access for all databases that can talk to even 3rd party apps.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by davnicwil on Thursday May 27, 2021 @05:35PM (#27308864)
You should check out Stacker [0] and see if it works for your usecase - we let you build apps without code using Airtable or Google Sheets as a backend. Might be what you need if time is of the essence and you don't want to worry about hosting either. I work at Stacker, my email's in my profile if you have any questions.

[0] https://stackerhq.com

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by yarapavan on Thursday May 27, 2021 @11:42AM (#27304412)
Congratulations! Exciting to see nocodb adding to the low-code/no-code scene today. Best wishes to you and your team.

1. What is your monetization strategy? 2. Why AGPL? 3. Is there a tutorial or documentation on creating additional integrations?

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @12:13PM (#27304747)
Thank you so much.

Monetization we'll figure it out whilst interacting with our community. AGPL : we don't want to be sorry with likes of AWS etc around :) This wouldn't stop you from using it freely or commercially.

We would be rolling out the tutorial for adding integrations.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by scotu on Thursday May 27, 2021 @05:17PM (#27308663)
Happy to see you try AGPL honestly. It might turn out to not be the right choice, but I think as a license it didn't get a fair test because of how businesses avoiding viral licenses made software authors shy away from them. With the AWS situation I really wish to see more use, and if it can be successful.
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by steveharman on Thursday May 27, 2021 @01:31PM (#27305705)
Please forgive the total-noob question but once I've hooked up to say a mySQL db - can I write to the db as well as read from it?

Thanks

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @02:40PM (#27306530)
Yes, its just like your google spreadsheets. You can insert/edit/delete. And share views with and without password.
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by steveharman on Thursday May 27, 2021 @03:42PM (#27307293)
Fantastic, thanks!
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by jasonblais on Thursday May 27, 2021 @11:01AM (#27303942)
This is an exciting release! Look forward to seeing how this project takes off.
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Thursday May 27, 2021 @11:06AM (#27303996)
Thank you.

Getting started is really simple - please check below.

    docker run -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb
    or
    npx create-nocodb-app
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by towelpluswater on Friday May 28, 2021 @07:55AM (#27314283)
This is neat, nice work. Any plans to add Snowflake as a database?
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by seektable on Saturday May 29, 2021 @06:46AM (#27324353)
Snowflake is a DW solution - in most cases it is populated from other OLTP DBs and uses as a data source for BI tools. What is the purpose of editing data directly in Snowflake?..
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by croes on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @02:51PM (#27359479)
Can't seem to get it to run on Windows 10 via npx or git clone.

Both ways show error 9009, failed at the [email protected] install script.

Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by prox on Friday May 28, 2021 @02:48AM (#27312445)
Is there any way to turn this into a desktop app?
Re:Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative by nocodb on Friday May 28, 2021 @09:38AM (#27315172)
In our 2nd iteration this was a desktop app that could connect to database, create-edit schema and generate code and was without spreadsheet.