[HN Gopher] Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) - Edit your database wi...
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Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) - Edit your database with the ease of
a spreadsheet
Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash (https://www.basedash.io).
BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production
database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It's like being able to
use Airtable to manage your company's internal operations. I was
working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of
manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine,
but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL
database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows). After
building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that
there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin
panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface
that's usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to
access data within their company (e.g. customer support,
operations). From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on
expanding upon existing tools I love, with extra care and polish.
The resulting product is a polished, opinionated internal tool,
with all the functionality most companies need out-of-the-box.
Being a web app, there are some great features that BaseDash
enables for cross-functional teams. BaseDash keeps a full edit
history of all changes made, makes it super easy to share access to
teammates, and enables Google Sheets-like real-time collaboration
for editing data. We currently support most SQL databases
(PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, SQL Server, MariaDB), with support
for MongoDB and Firestore on the roadmap. We offer a hosted
version, or you can host it yourself on-prem. We're still in early
access but happy to invite the Hacker News community to try the
product out. We're currently focused on small-to-medium sized
software companies, with a combination of engineers and non-
technical users. Try it here: https://www.basedash.io and let me
know what you think!
Author : maxmusing
Score : 114 points
Date : 2020-07-30 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| taylorwc wrote:
| I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming
| from a finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to
| relational database felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-
| like ways to interact with those databases has always felt like
| white space to me. Well done!
| joparisot wrote:
| Hey Taylor, You should check out actiondesk (disclaimer: I'm
| the founder)! We're complementary from basedash (not doing the
| writing to the database, but focusing on viewing and analyzing
| your db data in a spreadsheet)
| maxmusing wrote:
| Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.
| skunkwerk wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. Have wanted something like this for years
| - most admin tools aren't easy to use like Airtable, and Airtable
| itself isn't designed to be a backend for your apps. Would love
| to see a lower-priced tier for just a single user (no
| collaborators).
| maxmusing wrote:
| Thanks! We'll probably add a cheaper plan for individuals soon.
| If you're interested, we can set something custom up now. Shoot
| me an email: max@basedash.io
| smt88 wrote:
| > _internal tool that lets you edit your production database with
| the ease of a spreadsheet_
|
| I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that
| allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe.
|
| As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to
| prod data, where they may not understand the schema well enough
| to edit it. Tech people already have GUIs.
|
| Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a
| thin layer of code is much more viable.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get
| me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like
| there are many products and companies trying to compete in this
| space.
| maxmusing wrote:
| We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with
| products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that
| BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI
| builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a
| really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from
| needing engineers to build the UI themselves.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _We 're betting that most companies can get away with a
| really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from
| needing engineers to build the UI themselves._
|
| Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of
| your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use,
| then that'd be something. All the best.
|
| [0] database _is_ the app?
| maxmusing wrote:
| We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database
| hosting early on in development, but it was super janky.
| Might look into this again in the future.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There is no way that my current organization would buy this,
| but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer
| support or even operations analysts could do this instead of
| needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.
| shreyas-satish wrote:
| Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider
| the positioning of the product if I were in your shoes.
|
| As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data
| integrity if non-technical people are bypassing app-level
| validations.
|
| That said, while I may not use this for my mission-critical data,
| I do think there's a lot of potential in using this as a headless
| CMS. I'm currently using Airtable, and its API limits make it
| unusable for anything apart from light workloads. Also, doesn't
| have webhooks.
|
| But, if I can use BaseDash instead as my CMS and have my
| marketing team handle the data through a familiar interface,
| while design + dev source the data into Figma & a static site
| through an API respectively, I see myself paying for this.
| maxmusing wrote:
| Absolutely, we have a couple customers using BaseDash as a
| headless CMS. Edit history is especially nice here because you
| can always look through past iterations of content.
| kkotak wrote:
| Any plans to support NoSQL?
| maxmusing wrote:
| Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| How does this differ from something like DBeaver? Our QA Analysts
| (semi-manual testers) use that for making tweaks to our
| databases, both production and otherwise. Developers also use it
| because it is frequently easier than the command line when we do
| not know all the table and column names.
|
| Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?
| maxmusing wrote:
| Yes, it's meant to be much easier for non-technical teammates,
| plus has more collaborative functionality built for teams (easy
| to share access, team-wide edit history, real-time
| collaboration).
|
| I tend to think of tools like DBeaver as being built for
| individual, technical users, while BaseDash is built for cross-
| functional teams.
| ron22 wrote:
| You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was
| made, that's really cool.
| itachicomment wrote:
| They should use this as their main selling point.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to
| action at the bottom was well made;
|
| > Skip the waitlist, this week only
|
| > We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our
| Hacker News launch.
|
| Usually when someone is like "act now" I'm like "yeah right". But
| in this case, whether it really matters or not that I sign up
| exactly this week, the fact that you put some effort into
| connecting the text to the HN post made it feel more genuine and
| was sufficient to instead make me go "alright I'll do it".
|
| I don't immediately have time to use it but I can tell that this
| product is useful so I'm making a mental note to log back in in
| the future and check it out more. For now I was happy to see that
| in addition to the UX niceties that were mentioned on the landing
| page, you guys make it possible to configure a connection with
| SSH between your servers and the db servers of the user. That is
| very encouraging to see :)
|
| I think on top of that it would be neat if you also offered users
| to configure connections that go through Wireguard, as I run
| Wireguard on my personal server and I know other people do too. I
| guess one guy asking for Wireguard is probably not going to
| convince you to add it. But who knows, maybe others will request
| it too ;)
| maxmusing wrote:
| Thanks! We thought it would be best for HN to have direct
| access (we didn't do this for Product Hunt).
|
| I'll keep Wireguard in mind :)
| asavinov wrote:
| The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability
| to derive (infer) new data from _multiple_ tables, particularly,
| by linking tables and aggregating data (using these links).
| Airtable had an interesting approach to this problem (yet, not
| perfect imho). Here I do not see how can I derive new tables or
| columns from already existing ones except for using SQL. If
| BaseDash relies on SQL then the question is what are its USPs
| which are directly related to data?
| maxmusing wrote:
| We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a
| couple clicks through the UI. Definitely looking into adding
| aggregated data & computed columns soon!
| kanobo wrote:
| Congrats and looks great, I like the tracking history/change. If
| everything is tracked is there a feature to rollback to a
| previous state? If so, why not also advertise it as a innovative
| backup + edit solution? That would be be a bigger deal than just
| the spreadsheet part since people already use DataGrip or
| TablePlus.
| maxmusing wrote:
| We only track changes made through BaseDash, so we don't have
| full snapshots of your database to revert to. We'll definitely
| add a feature to rollback individual edits though.
| pratio wrote:
| The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like
| this can fly in any of our production services where changes can
| be made directly to a production database without an audit trail.
| Even the example on the website where the account credit is being
| increased is something that I've yet to see in a production
| system. To safely use it on a production system internally it
| would have to be deployed on premise.
|
| In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if
| something goes wrong. I use airtable extensively in my personal
| projects and at work which seems to work fine.
|
| One more thing i observed about the company structure is that
| they're based in Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that
| as startups go, this isn't unheard of but trying to get this past
| legal would be nightmare.
|
| Congratulations on the launch though.
| maxmusing wrote:
| We have edit history which acts as an audit trail for changes;
| view logs are coming soon too.
|
| We offer on-prem, and expect a good portion of SMBs to use it
| over our cloud version.
|
| Good catch on the virtual office! We're actually based in
| Canada, that's our US company's legal address.
| pratio wrote:
| I have several clients that are startups and i usually
| recommend them JetBrains Datagrip which has yet to
| disappoint. It also makes it easier to access the databases
| directly behind a VPN. Is there a limit to the number of
| databases a single user can access on a startup license?
|
| The reason i am asking this is that even a small startup can
| have multiple databases in production. A single license of
| DataGrip might sound more beneficial in that case.
| interactivecode wrote:
| could we self host this for DIY/home use?
| danpalmer wrote:
| The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.
|
| The reason we typically _don 't_ directly edit production data
| like this is because of application level concerns or validation.
|
| I think it's important that any tool like this allows a way to
| replicate that safety in some way, otherwise it's as risky as
| using a GUI client directly. Access control (which this does)
| addresses security and starts addressing safety, but there's a
| lot more necessary to get to the safety that is often enforced at
| the application level.
|
| There's an argument that the validation should be in the
| database, and that's nice when it's possible, but it's often not.
| For any application using Rails/Django, anything else along those
| lines, anyone interacting with the database mostly via an ORM,
| will typically not be putting this sort of validation in the
| database in _all_ cases - thinking about enums, fixed slugs,
| relative dates, timezone support, etc.
| hogFeast wrote:
| One of the examples in the splash video is a person
| incrementing account credit...if I was a finance guy, this
| would terrify me...
|
| ...obviously, technical stuff like consistency seems
| problematic too.
| maxmusing wrote:
| Definitely agree with this. As you mentioned, we currently
| support database-level validation (anything data type related,
| foreign keys, etc.), still trying to figure out the best way to
| handle ORM-level validation.
|
| I think ultimately BaseDash would hook into your existing
| validations (e.g. through models.py) to handle this.
| pqdbr wrote:
| This.
|
| We have very complex business logic directly tied to our Rails
| / ActiveRecord validations (and, btw, they are a blessing).
|
| Also, it's not only validations. We rely heavily on
| ActiveRecord callbacks, which are awsome. We have hundreds of
| before_save, after_save, after_create_commit, and so on, all
| over our models, and they are also indispensable to our
| business rules.
|
| For a simple example, if I need to sync my User model with
| Mailchimp after an e-mail update, this tool would not fire the
| after_commit callbacks.
|
| Having said that, I would definitely pay for a "service" that
| would act as gem in my application, mount itself on a specific
| endpoint (think /turbo-admin), and give me the exact same
| feature set I saw on this landing page, but with the ease of
| mind that all our updates would go through Rails, running
| validations and callbacks.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > The main question I have with tools like this is around
| safety.
|
| " _Your app 's data is never stored on our servers with the
| exception of edit history which lets you audit all changes to
| your data_" from: https://www.basedash.io/pricing
|
| Not the most convincing sell but not that they did not address
| this concern at all.
| penagwin wrote:
| He's talking about operational safety - your application
| applies validation to inputs to the database. This ensures
| that only valid data is stored.
|
| What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9,
| but it's an int field and someone types in 22 on accident?
| Sure it might be valid for the database, but it's not valid
| for the application.
|
| There's certainly different ways to take the problem, but it
| needs to be considered.
| koolba wrote:
| > What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be
| 0-9, but it's an int field and someone types in 22 on
| accident? Sure it might be valid for the database, but it's
| not valid for the application.
|
| This is why database constraints exist.
|
| Any sufficiently long lived database ends up with more than
| one code base connected to it. Enforcing rules in the
| database ensures a baseline level of data sanity.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think that's a different thing. If we think about a field
| that is an enumeration (in some form), this might need to
| deserialise to a language-native enumeration option in the
| application, or need to have one of a small set of values. If
| someone puts a typo into that field with this tool that could
| cause issues in production.
|
| Yes an audit log may help you notice these and fix them, but
| that's probably not going to be enough for anyone running a
| product in production off this database.
| nojvek wrote:
| I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn't
| make it to YC. I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an
| MVP, but couldn't get any paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to
| find a paying job to make ends meet after many months on it.
|
| I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as
| polished as BaseDash or popsql. It's MIT licensed.
|
| https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin
|
| Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish
| you best of luck. Even though I'm a bit jealous.
| randtrain34 wrote:
| $50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get
| something like https://retool.com/pricing/ for $10/user/month.
| Granted it's a bit of a different market, but it does a lot more
| in addition to having editable/searchable/filterable DB tables.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It seems to be the same as the retool pro version with audit
| logs.
| bikamonki wrote:
| TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB
| will most likely break stuff.
|
| I wrote something similar to BaseDash ages ago, I called it
| dAgent (for database agent). I had it running for many different
| clients from all sorts of trades (I do custom development). The
| GUI built itself from reading the DB schema.
|
| My initial motivation was to cut dev time since dAgent would
| automate the coding of CRUD interfaces. However, the use of
| dAgent in production ended up being quite limited: maybe only
| used to edit catalog data (i.e. add a city to the cities table).
| The reason for this limited usage is no mystery: one can easily
| break things. In particular non-IT users can break things.
|
| Allow me to use an example. You have a CRM with a customers
| table. On that table there is a field called status. For that
| field, dAgent would load a select input using the related table
| statuses, there was no risk to break integrity. However, in the
| business logic of this CRM, changing the status of a customer is
| the result of running a process. That process not only sets the
| status of a customer to a new value, but also writes a history
| log, sends email notifications and perhaps triggers an invoicing
| process.
|
| Now, imagine a non-IT user changing the status field of a
| customer using a tool such as BaseDash. Now you have a customer
| in status active who is able to login to your paid SAAS but has
| never being invoiced.
|
| Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a
| DB.
|
| For this reason, in production, dAgent features where limited to
| CRUDing simple catalog tables. It did help, but was not the
| silver bullet I had hoped for. On the other hand, IT users would
| never adopt dAgent since the DB engine provided a much more
| robust and feature-rich admin GUI. I was not in the business of
| competing with PHPMyAdmin, so I eventually dropped the project.
| secboy wrote:
| I just asked my CISO, about this product.
|
| He said, "For small, and really small companies they already have
| the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how
| they handle most of their problems because they don't have a
| "console" interface. So this would be just another product for
| them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful
| because they already know how to interact with the database.
|
| For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those
| companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access
| to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter
| productive.
|
| However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well
| implemented."
|
| Oh, I forgot to add that he said "Allowing a 3rd party web site
| to connect directly to a production database for the purpose
| allowing direct database manipulation will only happen with
| companies that don't have a security department, or their
| "security person" is just in name only. There are so many things
| that can go wrong that is just not worth doing. Even if this
| could run on site, is runs against basically all Information
| Security and IT operations best practices."
| mmsimanga wrote:
| I see this as a substitute for spreadsheets. I work in Business
| Intelligence and we spend a fair amount of time importing data
| from user spreadsheets that need to be incorporated into data
| warehouse and reports. It is a nightmare of a process because
| so many things can go wrong. I would jump at opportunity to
| substitute the spreadsheets for database tables.
| knubie wrote:
| > For small, and really small companies they already have the
| talent to deal with the database directly because that's how
| they handle most of their problems because they don't have a
| "console" interface.
|
| I feel like small and really small comparies are the primary
| market for this tool. A sort of stepping stone until they can
| build out a large enough engineering team to support more
| specialized internal tooling. A _lot_ of small companies store
| most / all of their business data in spread sheets anyway,
| BaseDash just gives them a more robust backend (SQL) that
| allows them to transition more seamlessly into custom back
| office software.
|
| > So this would be just another product for them, and the
| technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they
| already know how to interact with the database.
|
| The technical staff would find it tremendously useful because
| they can focus on building a solid data model on top of a SQL
| database without having to spend time building out clunky admin
| interfaces. And from the other direction they don't need to
| build out migrations from legacy spreadsheet data into a SQL
| database.
|
| > For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those
| companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access
| to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is
| counter productive.
|
| Maybe, but if BaseDash offers robust enough validations and
| permissioning, this shouldn't be as much of a concern. The flip
| side is that without BaseDash, if some data needs to be tweaked
| that isn't possible to do using the clunky ad hoc admin
| interfaces that were built, someone on the engineering team
| would need to make those changes in the database manually, or
| ops would need to wait for engineering to build out a feature
| to allow them to make those changes.
| jadbox wrote:
| The pricing model is a little strange to me. I would like to see
| a minimal free tier and then a micro pay-as-you-go query cost
| than a large set monthly cost.
| benoror wrote:
| Any plans for an API?
| itachicomment wrote:
| Look Good from the description.However i know this is not a very
| necessary feature but consider adding google login, its easier
| and quick especially for people who want to test the product
| before committing.
| solrflow wrote:
| How does this compare with Prisma Studio? (Prisma framework
| specifically Prisma 2). Our company is graphql based and uses
| Prisma Studio as our visual gui for our db
| switz wrote:
| I've been ruminating on this exact problem for months. I'm
| consulting at a company where we have a lot of non-engineers who
| own several major processes w/r/t data sources of truth.
| Engineers need up-to-date programmatic access to that data, and
| the non-engineers need a way to keep that information accurate.
|
| This is awesome. I was considering building it myself, but it's
| always a pleasure to see someone else deliver a working product
| on an idea you've been bouncing around. Good luck, this is a
| relatively 'simple' product with a huge market.
| maxmusing wrote:
| Glad to hear you like the product! Would love to hear your
| thoughts after trying it.
| nrudrapp wrote:
| We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it). But it is free and
| our engineers get by with most of what's required from tool like
| it.
|
| And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project -
| what does you stack looks like frontend and backend ?
|
| And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though!
|
| It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600
| per year.
|
| Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying
| for this ?
| maxmusing wrote:
| The stack is Node.js with Express and React. We use Sequelize
| to handle database connections.
|
| As others mentioned, our current pricing is in line with higher
| tiers of other internal tools, mostly geared towards startups
| with revenue or funding. We're hoping to add cheaper (and
| free!) plans moving forward once we validate that we can make
| money from SMBs.
|
| Early customers are using the product for customer support,
| order management, basic analytics dashboards, data entry. Good
| mix of technical and non-technical users within teams.
| fortydegrees wrote:
| I'm CTO of a very early stage startup and $50/mo to allow my
| CEO to read and edit the database is an easy decision.
| iKlsR wrote:
| I disagree, speaking on production data, if your CEO is
| technical enough they should be able to do this (for whatever
| reason they have).
|
| If not, you need some sort of admin interface (could be a
| couple forms) to address this properly so invalid data can't
| be plopped in OR any changes should be documented and sent to
| someone technical even if it's a typo fix. It seems fun and
| easy but production data isn't something you should wrap in
| an excel interface and give to any and everyone. $600 a year
| so your boss can update names and dates is kinda hard to
| justify as well.
| nrudrapp wrote:
| In a startup, are you sure you like to spend 600 bucks on a
| db edit tool - what stage is your startup ?
| nrmitchi wrote:
| This is a half-joke of a comment, but I would pay $50/month
| to a product that could explicitly prohibit the CEO from
| editing the production database.
| iKlsR wrote:
| I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above
| and I was like why would you want to give such access to
| someone who is more than likely non-technical. I can't see
| any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode but
| then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your
| app.
| ggregoire wrote:
| > We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it).
|
| Why do you "hate" it? (such a strong word!) My only complaint
| is that I need to invalidate the connection every time I don't
| query anything for a few minutes, otherwise the next query
| hangs for like 50 seconds. But apart from that, I think it's
| great, especially for a free product. And the project is very
| active, it gets a new release about every 15 days.
| nrudrapp wrote:
| Not the best editor for schema design I would say. MySQL
| workbench is great in that respect. Wish something of that
| sort existed for other dbs.
|
| I have NOT come across connection invalidation problem
| though.
| contrarianmop wrote:
| Here is a feature i would like to suggest: a mechanism for change
| reviews, so that any non tech person can make DB changes, but
| have them reviewed by peers (much like a github review) and
| approved before having them applied. Can save a lot of headaches.
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