Table synchronization between different bases (Use case explained)

I think this is a very popular feature in Airtable, so much so I think this is one of the key features used to push people into their premium tier offerings.

My basic use case is that I have one workspace that is just for me as an admin and then a few workspaces that are shared and there are a few tables I’d like to have synchronized so I can just stay inside the Admin workspace and not have to leave and head into the other workspace to check on this data.

I guess optimally, from a technical perspective, it would be cool if this could be implemented simply by doing something like a symlink such that the data from that table is inserted without increasing the total size of your baserow install by actually duplicating all the data in a new table and having to do all the back-and-forth work of keeping them synchronized.

That said, Airtable ALSO allows the owners of each of the synchronized tables to add their own additional fields to the synchronized table so each party can keep modifying it and have their own unique data added on to the synchronized data. This allows an admin to review work done by collaborators and keep his own, private notation system on top of it that his collaborators do not see. Pretty powerful.

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I don’t see this feature request on GitLab, want us to pop it in there?

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Sure, yeah … I default to post stuff here so everyone sees it and to make sure no one else has suggested it before.

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Hey @bfranklin

As far as I know we do not consider any sort of cross-workspace data synchronisation at the moment. (@bram please correct me if we changed our opinion on that)

That being said, we are starting work on our RBAC (Role based access control) system which allows you to assign permissions for users within a workspace.

We are still in the design phase where we decide how exactly it should work and how granular we want to go with this system, but there have been discussions of allowing an admin to restrict access to data even on a row level.

I’d like to reiterate that those aren’t promises yet, they are just discussions we have had internally, but maybe something like that would solve your use case as well?

Let me know how you feel about that :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply @Alex … I know you guys have a large road map and perhaps the role based will help. I had been using one master dashboard in Airtable that only I could see and it pulled in data from other tables that were collaborative and I think this would still be my optimal solution – and I am still keeping some bases in Airtable because of this feature and ability. I continue to use Baserow for other stuff and track the great progress, however.

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Dear @bfranklin! As we are seeing more and more community requests related to the synchronization topic, we decided to first dedicate some time and brainstorm on how synchronization should work in Baserow: logic, features, etc. We also consider developing a synchronization plugin that will copy&paste data from one table to another in some time intervals.

We will keep in mind the request on ‘Table synchronization between different bases’, as well as this one: Github Issues <--> Baserow Synchronization. And feel free to contribute and share ideas on other synchronization features you want to see in Baserow :pray:

I will keep you posted on the progress!

Hi!
@olgatrykush would you maybe have some news regarding this topic?
Best,
Ludo

Hey @Ludom, not yet! I’ll bring up this topic once again. :raised_hands:

Given Airtable are shafting their users on the feature would be a good time to push this up your list to be copied

Hello @Ludom, before we start building this feature, we first need to implement the feature that allows linking to a table in another database: Link to a table in another database (#1354) · Issues · Baserow / baserow · GitLab. We’ve reprioritized this, so we should begin work on it even sooner. Once this feature is ready, we will revisit the request for table synchronization. But we don’t think that it will be implemented in the near future, unfortunately.