Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet

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?

You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was made, that's really cool.

could we self host this for DIY/home use?

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!

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.

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 ;)

$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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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).

Any plans to support NoSQL?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

Any plans for an API?

> 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.

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.