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Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

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Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#51

Post by ryan_platofy »

pavish wrote: post #49
ryan_platofy wrote: post #47

This looks great and congratulations on the alpha launch! Reminds me of another open source project in this space, NocoDB. Are you guys familiar with that project? If so, what are the main differences between them and what you are offering?

Thank you! We've documented the differences between Mathesar and other similar products including NocoDB on the FAQ section[1] in our website. [1] https://mathesar.org/faq.html#how-is-mathesar-different-from...

Apologies, somehow missed that. Thanks for the speedy response. Your explanation is very clear. Something that is keeping me tied to Airtable is their 'interface designer'. Allows for rapidly building internal admin tools. Something similar is apparently on NocoDB's roadmap (they are calling it page designer I believe). Am I correct in saying that this not something that is on your current Roadmap (had a look, but did not spot something similar, but could have misread)?

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#52

Post by dmos62 »

iambcam wrote: post #26

I'm sorry if this question is stupid, I'm still learning a little about technology. The little bit of knowledge I have tells me that my product team shouldn't directly access the same production database as my application. The idea for this product would be to create a copy of my production base and give access to it through this tool? Wouldn't the cost of this replica be too expensive?

To add to what Pavish said, reads are always safe, so you can examine, monitor, make reports and what we call Explorations (our user-friendly spin on Postgres views) of your data without worries. When it comes to adding data and updating it, that can be safe as well in many cases, but definitely should consult with someone that knows the specifics of your application. Schema changes, however, are very likely to break something, hence the permission system Pavish described.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#53

Post by pavish »

ryan_platofy wrote: post #51
pavish wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We've documented the differences between Mathesar and other similar products including NocoDB on the FAQ section[1] in our website. [1] https://mathesar.org/faq.html#how-is-mathesar-different-from...

Apologies, somehow missed that. Thanks for the speedy response. Your explanation is very clear. Something that is keeping me tied to Airtable is their 'interface designer'. Allows for rapidly building internal admin tools. Something similar is apparently on NocoDB's roadmap (they are calling it page designer I believe). Am I correct in saying that this not something that is on your current Roadmap (had a look, but di…

You're right, it's not in our current roadmap, which focuses mainly on features that improve data entry, analysis, visualization, and collaboration. Having said that, Mathesar could grow as a product and have a diverse set of features we've not yet planned, in the next few years.

A feature to build interfaces for internal admin tools sounds very cool, and while we cannot say that it's coming for sure, we'll definitely be discussing it. Please feel free to open a feature request issue on our Github repo, we'd appreciate it.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#54

Post by [deleted] »

ryan_platofy wrote: post #51
pavish wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We've documented the differences between Mathesar and other similar products including NocoDB on the FAQ section[1] in our website. [1] https://mathesar.org/faq.html#how-is-mathesar-different-from...

Apologies, somehow missed that. Thanks for the speedy response. Your explanation is very clear. Something that is keeping me tied to Airtable is their 'interface designer'. Allows for rapidly building internal admin tools. Something similar is apparently on NocoDB's roadmap (they are calling it page designer I believe). Am I correct in saying that this not something that is on your current Roadmap (had a look, but di…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#56

Post by dmos62 »

koolba wrote: post #30
xupybd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth are you handling HN front page traffic if you spin up a template copy per session? That is impressive.

You’d be (pleasantly) surprised how easy it is to copy a postgres database. It literally copies the data files for the database to a new directory so the operation is relatively quick if the total volume of data is not large. What’s more challenging is handling many concurrent connections as a different database would mandate a separate connection and you can’t perform any meaningful connection pooling.

That's accurate! Another bottleneck we have is Mathesar-level state management. We keep some state to reduce redundant Postgres queries. During most of development we focused on single-database use cases, but for the demo we had to expand to managing state for multiple databases in as isolated way as possible. That forced us to face some technical debt in assumptions we made about our state and how we organize it. State-related technical debt is the most challenging, imo.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#57

Post by dmos62 »

seancolsen wrote: post #12
vhanda wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask, have you found using a Typed language such as Typescript has changed your tendency to use Python for other tasks, given that it isn't typed? [0] [0] - I understand that types can be added on top, but I never found the integration to work that well with mypy when I last tried it many years ago.

Yeah, interesting question! Our [team][0] is eight people who would probably give eight different answers. We've had some [debate][1] about whether or not to use types in Python, and eventually we settled on not using them. However we do use TypeScript. That makes our team a bit stratified across these different typing paradigms. This stratification seems to work okay though because each engineer's role is focused on…

I'm on Mathesar's backend team (hi Sean!) and I love types. It's actually a controversial topic amongst us (as might be gleaned from the discussion linked in above comment). I'd say we've come down to using a reduced set of Python features for the sake of community accessibility and maintainability. Maintainability argument being that types can be misused! I personally enjoy having the fanciest toolset, and I imagine that future community members will appreciate more interesting language features being used (because I expect them to be like me), but I also can't say that my personal viewpoint is more valid than the conservative approach we've chosen to adopt. That said, we've been focused on launch and, when that's done, language-related choices might yet be revisited!

There's something to be said about balancing what's interesting and what's accessible. If anyone has stories to share, I'd love to hear it.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#58

Post by noisy_boy »

seancolsen wrote: post #12
vhanda wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask, have you found using a Typed language such as Typescript has changed your tendency to use Python for other tasks, given that it isn't typed? [0] [0] - I understand that types can be added on top, but I never found the integration to work that well with mypy when I last tried it many years ago.

Yeah, interesting question! Our [team][0] is eight people who would probably give eight different answers. We've had some [debate][1] about whether or not to use types in Python, and eventually we settled on not using them. However we do use TypeScript. That makes our team a bit stratified across these different typing paradigms. This stratification seems to work okay though because each engineer's role is focused on…

I work on back and front-end and universally like types. Compile time guarantees are a huge reliability booster.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#59

Post by hultner »

Looks cool however I don’t like that it needs to be setup with a super-user and that it’s limited to your three predetermined access roles. I have a project in mind where this tool could be useful but everything is built with row level security policies and roles, the database includes sensitive data and authentication user for the connection have basically no access by itself, so it looks like Mathesar wouldn’t be useful here.

I also know of another similar project heavily utilizing RLS where end users actually have a 1:1 database user with access to their own data, here something like Mathesar could be nice as well if it would play nice with ACL/RLS.

Re: Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases

#60

Post by mathemancer »

hebrox wrote: post #55

Looks really cool! I tried the install script and it asked me for my computer password. It feels really dangerous to give a random script from the internet my password. Could you maybe change this, so this is not necessary?

At the moment, the only installation method we support uses Docker, which requires elevated privileges on most systems. We're probably going to reduce the privileges needed for some macOS installations in the near future, since Docker runs differently there.
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