Open-source SaaS tools are becoming popular day-by-day and companies are more likely to use these tools in the coming future. One of the most popular easy-to-use SaaS platforms that helps to create and share multiple RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems) is Airtable. By using Airtable, you can share data from multiple databases and integrate them on your platforms. Similar to Airtable, another free and widely used open-source database is PostgreSQL.
Airtable PostgreSQL Integration is the process through which you can easily transfer data from Airtable to PostgreSQL easily. This process plays a pivotal role in linking both these technologies and setting up any applications that require data from both these tools.
In this article, you will learn how to set up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration. You will also be given a brief overview of both Airtable and PostgreSQL and some features of Airtable PostgreSQL Integration too. Read along how you can set up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration for your organization.
Introduction to Airtable
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Airtable is a very easy-to-use SaaS platform that helps in the creation and the sharing of relational databases. Its features include a very user-friendly interface, easy-to-understand functionality, and a simple user onboarding process, unlike other databases.
One can perform the functionalities like organize, store, and collaborate (if needed) on the information that is stored in a database, for example, product inventory, employee directory, house rent lists, etc.. depending on what type of parameters are present in your dataset. One most important thing is, one doesn’t even need to understand the basics of SQL to work with it.
To learn more about Airtable, click this link.
Introduction to PostgreSQL
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PostgreSQL is one of the most widely used open-source relational databases you can use for free. In addition to being open-source, it is highly extensible as it allows you to define your data types, develop your own custom functions & write code in different programming languages without even recompiling and updating your database.
PostgreSQL also adheres to SQL Standard more closely than other databases like MySQL. It is highly scalable and can safely store the most complicated data workloads. Furthermore, it runs successfully on all major operating systems and is ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) compliant too.
To learn more about PostgreSQL, click this link.
Importance of Setting Up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration
Connecting Airtable with PostgreSQL provides a lot of functionalities including:
- All your data: In one database, you’ll have access to all the data in your Airtable base.
- One can directly run all the SQL functionalities on the data and query data in any way desired.
- It becomes easy for data, once in PostgreSQL, to get integrated with all other data visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI, etc.
Airtable & PostgreSQL Arrays
As mentioned before, Airtable provides a very user-friendly interface and makes it possible for users to add or create new tables, change or edit any existing columns and delete the columns if needed. To consider, let’s say we have an Employees table with a column that contains the employee’s Photo Id. If more Photo IDs are needed, we just need to drag another image and replace the existing one. There is no need to migrate the columns or delete previous columns etc. It is that simple.
This flexibility can be used easily to pull data out of Airtable into PostgreSQL with the help of Airtable API. The pulled data is represented as PostgreSQL Arrays. Therefore, if any image is added, PostgreSQL tables provide the flexibility to support it without one to perform any migrations, changes in existing queries, or anything else.
Airtable API helps in containing multiple values including lookups, collaborators, multiple select & attachments, and all these field types are represented in PostgreSQL as the arrays which are first-class in PostgreSQL.
Methods to Set Up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration
Understanding the working process of Airtable can be a challenge sometimes. As it looks and gives a feel like it is a database but in reality, it is not possible to query it like a database. In general, there are 2 methods to set up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration:
Method 1: Manual Airtable PostgreSQL Integration
You can directly export data from Airtable and transfer that data into PostgreSQL. This way you can establish a connection between Airtable and PostgreSQL. You can do this by following 2 simple steps:
The Airtable API key requires the following information to extract data out of Airtable:
- Connection URL: The Connection URL is all you need for many applications and programming libraries.
- ‘psql Commannd’: Click-to-Copy command can also be included to run ‘psql’, which is a great command-line client for PostgreSQL.
- Raw Credentials: In the end, there is some flexibility for you to provide the programming and application libraries through the parameters entered individually. These are the credentials usually needed:
- Host: This is a URL needed to access the database.
- Database: This is the name of your database, you created.
- User: This is the username for your database, you created.
- Port: This is a port used for syncing.
- Password: Password created for your database.
After these things have been provided, these will extract data out of Airtable with the help of the Airtable API and load it onto the PostgreSQL database.
Step 2: Querying Data in the PostgreSQL Database
In Airtable, each Airtable base maps one-to-one with the PostgreSQL database. The name of the database can be edited as well. Usually, there are two schemas in your database:
- ‘public‘: This is where usually all the tables are located and this is what is generally used.
- ‘public_swap‘: This is used for syncing operations which is not needed at the moment.
Finally, after loading the data, this is how your Airtable data is looking into PostgreSQL.
Image Source:Self
As you can see, any field in Airtable can hold multiple values including multiple select, attachment, and lookup.
Airtable and PostgreSQL Arrays
Before moving towards dealing with practical problems, it is important to know about Postgres arrays a bit in detail as they provide all the functionalities to work with.
Typically, arrays in PostgreSQL Tables are delimited with curly braces {}, instead of [].
The Lookup Field provides the connectivity between different parameters of the database as shown in the below figure in the form of Product Inventory.
Image Source:Self
The following query can help in selecting some columns.
SELECT product_inventory_updated FROM warehouse_locations_updated;
The product_Inventory comes out to be as One Column as shown below.
Image Source: Self
While setting up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration, fields can contain multiple values and we can extract the values one by one that helps in making the extraction process simple. Some of these queries are given below:
- Unnest()
The unnest() functionality allows one to un-nest each item of an array onto its own or a separate row.
For example, if one wants to see which employee works for more than 8 hours and is performing his duties well, he can simply pull the list of all employees and their working hours.
To get this data, a simple query needed to be written is:
SELECT employees FROM HR_data WHERE working_hours::integer > 8;
2. ANY
ANY can be used to check if any specific quality needs to be checked in any employee, for example, hard-working nature, punctuality, etc. This is shown below.
SELECT Employee[1]
FROM HR_data
WHERE 'quality' = ANY(punctuality);
3. JOINS
Join us for one of the most important functions offered by PostgreSQL with the database.
It would be nice to see how many employees are in each branch of the office. Airtable lookup can help out in giving answers to this question but will not let you know exactly what you want. Moreover, in Airtable it will not be a simple process so one can leverage the functionality that PostgreSQL offers with the help of Join functionality.
Let’s use ANY with a JOIN to see how many employees are in each office:
SELECT
Office_locations.name AS "Office",
SUM((employees.numbers_present[1]::INTEGER)
FROM office_location
JOIN office_employees
ON EMployee_employee.id = ANY (office_location.employee_number)
GROUP BY office_locations.name
ORDER BY office_locations.name ASC;
Method 2: Using Hevo Data to Set Up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration
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Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps you directly transfer data from Airtable and 150+ other data sources to databases such as PostgreSQL, Data Warehouses, or a destination of your choice in a completely hassle-free & automated manner. Hevo is fully managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
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Hevo takes care of all your data preprocessing needs and lets you focus on key business activities and draw a much powerful insight on how to generate more leads, retain customers, and take your business to new heights of profitability. It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination.
Check out what makes Hevo amazing
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
- Incremental Data Load: Hevo allows the transfer of data that has been modified in real-time. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.
Conclusion
This article gave you a step-by-step guide on setting up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration. It also gave you an overview of both Airtable and PostgreSQL along with some code snippets when setting Airtable PostgreSQL Integration. Overall, Airtable PostgreSQL Integration can be set up using either the manual method or by using Hevo, but if time, ease of use, and minimal engineering requirements are parameters for you, using automated data platforms like Hevo can help you to set up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration seamlessly!
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If you want to integrate data from data sources like Airtable into your desired Database/destination such as PostgreSQL, and seamlessly visualize it in a BI tool of your choice, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will help simplify the ETL and management process of data sources and destinations.
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up here for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand.
Share your experience of setting up Airtable PostgreSQL Integration in the comments section below!