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Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

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Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#71
post #68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is basedash, and what is "an admin panel", i visited their site and google for like 10 minutes and still no clue what this is retool is a rad platfrom, i found it when i was looking for an MS lightswitch replacement, so its clear what it is also outerbase is a bit strange, its a cloud db interface and the download link is for mac (not windows, mac) , the use cases seem very particular (niche) to me

Yeah we had a windows version as well, it was a bit buggy so we decided to launch without it. I'm curious why does use case sound niche? We love to think that giving everyone access to data is a pretty big challenge to solve. Is it in our messaging or do you think the overall vision is off? Would love to understand how we could be more clear in what we are providing.

the market is huge, different people need different things making a cloud app is not niche, the mac only client was a bit unusual

for internal apps, moving to the cloud is a big step for most places i worked in, its a huge step

I just find it striking, that its considered as a casual thing or the norm, nowadays

I think maybe you might want to explain on your site, why puting your internal db on the cloud is safe, easy ... and not a big deal

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#72
Love the pitch video, absolutely nails it. I'd go even further and remove the SQL stuff from down below. It seems like you're trying to cater to a non-technical audience, for whom those might be confusing (as a tech guy I'd never use this really anyway). I don't like that there's no self-hosted version, but I guess you guys know your market better.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#73
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I wonder if this is a caching issue. It seems to be working on our part and no data is ever loaded. If you'd be willing to talk through a bit further I'd love to. brayden [at] outerbase [dot] com.

Assuming you use a token similar to JWT , then redirects and removing the token from the client don’t matter if you don’t blacklist the token on the backend, which if they were able to continue by hitting the back button seems the case. This does require you to keep a database of “logged-out” tokens and reject them, and occasionally run a cleanup script on the db to prune tokens from that table after they would have…

Appreciate your taking the time to give us this suggestion -- but to clarify, we do revoke the token :D

From the screenshot that was provided, they're seeing the client render a page, but it's failing to acquire any data from the API. If they opened the network inspector they'd likely see that the requests are 401'ing after logging out.

I'm not pretending that this is good UX -- it's not -- but it's not evidence of a security issue. That said, we have every intention of nailing down fantastic UX as quickly as possible. (I'm a recent addition to the company but) it pains me personally for anyone to see any mistakes and I hope to impress you soon.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#74
I'm running postgres on docker on an ec2 instance and outerbase lets me save the connection but doesn't show any schemas or let me query any tables.

I've checked and double checked firewalls to make sure the IP is whitelisted. I'm able to connect with the same setup from my personal computer via psql (with the only difference being the ip whitelisted)by whitelisting it.

Hope you get this working or add some improved connection diagnosist mechanism.

Edit:

If it helps, a POST request to

https://app.outerbase.com/api/v1/workspace/39b72940-083d-4aa...

Fails with a 503 response of > The server does not support SSL connections

... But it's not an SSL connection. I provided a plain ip address.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#75

so outerbox connects directly to the db without using a bridge service like Mode does? meh, i don’t want to allow inbound connections from the internet. i absolutely hate mode, but i liked their bridge connector.

We are working on providing VPN tunnel connections or VPC-to-VPC connections as well, but it's not quite available today. Thanks for sharing this concern with us!

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#76
post #72

Love the pitch video, absolutely nails it. I'd go even further and remove the SQL stuff from down below. It seems like you're trying to cater to a non-technical audience, for whom those might be confusing (as a tech guy I'd never use this really anyway). I don't like that there's no self-hosted version, but I guess you guys know your market better.

Thanks for the suggestions.

For the SQL stuff being displayed, we like that it gives non-technical users an opportunity to learn SQL along the way. Now providing it as an optional UI is a worthy consideration for us to perhaps make.

We do have a self-hosted version on our enterprise offering currently but I understand it might not be the most desirable for non-enterprise customers.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#77

How does this compare to Nocodb, Baserow, and Mathesar?

Great question. The three you've listed have their own great use cases as a visual spreadsheet layout for databases.

Some of our features that really help us stand out from this particular pack are the fact you can use EZQL in Outerbase to ask natural language questions on your database without knowing how to query (we'll even expose the SQL if you're interested in what was produced, great for learning SQL). Very helpful for larger databases. In addition to that you can take these queries and create data visualization right in our tool.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#78
This is great! Thanks for BigQuery integration, I was passively looking for an alternative interface. Looking forward to try it. Possible feature request (not sure if you have it) - BigQuery creates temporary tables after each query run. When exploring the data it would be super cool to write queries sequentially by using those temporary tables. I do it in BigQuery UI, but it's quite tedious.

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#79
post #65
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downloaded your "native Mac app" Turns out it's just Electron Disappointed. Will stick to TablePlus

Yeah I get it. We wanted to get a local version out there as it's what a lot of people want, but as you can imagine a full native mac app takes a ton of time to deliver. We thought Electron would be a nice interim until we go down the route further. I know Electron doesn't get a lot of love, is it the file size, the UX, or what about it makes it less desirable for you?

I understand. The issue was with your communication

In the comment above you told you have a "native Mac app". I almost got excited only to discover it's Electron, argh

Maybe next time you shouldn't use "native" when it's clearly not native. Just to set expectations right

Re: Launch HN: Outerbase (YC W23) – A new UI and editor for your database

#80
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you use a token similar to JWT , then redirects and removing the token from the client don’t matter if you don’t blacklist the token on the backend, which if they were able to continue by hitting the back button seems the case. This does require you to keep a database of “logged-out” tokens and reject them, and occasionally run a cleanup script on the db to prune tokens from that table after they would have…

Appreciate your taking the time to give us this suggestion -- but to clarify, we do revoke the token :D From the screenshot that was provided, they're seeing the client render a page, but it's failing to acquire any data from the API. If they opened the network inspector they'd likely see that the requests are 401'ing after logging out. I'm not pretending that this is good UX -- it's not -- but it's not evidence of a…

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