Someone pointed me to NocoDB as an alternative to Airtable here on HN a few days ago. I deployed an instance, and it does what it says on the tin. Supports SQL Server, Oracle and even SQLite, in addition to Postgres and MySQL.
Do you have any additional “killer feature(s)” that might convince me to switch?
The killer feature for many users is the ability to track new data with *virtual columns*, which stay in Plato and never touch your backend DB. It lets you extend schema for new operations without having to run a DB migration. They're great for support agents or other operators to take notes, track new customer requirements, etc..
Founder of Noco here - Congrats on your HN launch.
I see at the current state there is a massive difference between us and the initial launch of Plato.
We do support multiple databases and there are backlinks available with actual value in a spreadsheet cell (I see that isnt supported in Plato's links). By reading about virtual columns I felt its like a formula column but its not (between I don't see formula isn't supported yet in Plato). Only one of our user had the virtual column request before.
Mainly I see Plato does not YET support automatic Rest APIs for the databases, webhooks, grid view, gallery view, form view, webhooks, upload csv/json/excel, formulas, SQLite, SQL server, docker, executables, open-source and so many other features. Having said that Im sure these will be looked into in coming years.
Really happy to see simple and powerful tools in this space were lacking and we are all trying to fill the big void here.
Thanks for a great product! I wrote tens of thousands of lines of PHP 20 years ago to achieve this kind of functionality, but I ran out of steam as a solo developer, and I could not find anyone else interesting in helping with development at the time.
After installing Noco, I feel like I ran into a long-lost friend, albeit one with a facelift and a complete style make-over.
The requirement that you have a public IP for your database and a third party system is sucking in our data are giant red flags for industries with any sort of confidential or proprietary data.
A huge strength of NocoDB is that it is run as just another service accessible your DB that you own.
I can see Virtual Columns being interesting for reporting-type purposes. The mentioned use case of “notations” on data owned by someone else is also interesting. But again - do I really want someone else hosting my data? I don’t know.
Is the target here then basically shadow IT adding onto other people’s data sources that they can’t get the devs to change directly?
Yep, lots of users need on-prem/VPC deployment. It's next on the list. If you subscribe to our email list, you'll be the first to know when it's ready. In the meantime, we can set up an SSH tunnel for you if you email us.
I think low-code and really SaaS itself has made "Shadow IT" here to stay. Gone are the days of centralized IT. The sprawl and integration of disparate computing systems is the new normal.
But many of the engineers we talk with want to provide a self-serve environment for tooling, because it takes a lot of work off their plate that they can redirect to creating products and infrastructure. Data teams provide self-serve sandboxes to their teammates for analytics. We think engineers will come to see the importance of providing tooling sandboxes as well.
Do you have any additional “killer feature(s)” that might convince me to switch?