Working with underlying Postgres DB

Baserow Help
1

Are you using our SaaS platform (Baserow.io) or self-hosting Baserow?

Self-hosted

What do you need help with?

A colleague has just installed the self-hosted version of Baserow. I asked him to look at the underlying Postgres database to see if their was a clear relationship between Baserow’s workspaces, database & tables and what’s going on in the DB. He thought it wasn’t clear and even remarked that Baserow has created over 1000 tables, which doesn’t seem very efficient.

My interest in looking at the underlying database was to find a workaround for the fact that a template can’t share a table from another database. In my case, I wanted to have an Employee Directory, but have all other templates/applications (.eg. SWOT Analysis) use that single source for staff members rather than duplication. As Baserow doesn’t support it, I though using Postgres Logical Replication might be a workaround, but if the underlying use of Postgres is not clear, that’s not going to be an option.

If Baserow is only intended to use databases/tables it creates itself, how do you bring in external data?

/W

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Hey @europa,

Every table that’s created in Baserow, has its own PostgreSQL table. If you start Baserow for the first time, it installs all the templates, which creates quite some PostgreSQL tables. This is to be expected.

If you want to have a single source of truth for your staff members, then I recommend using the Baserow table sync feature (Create a table via data sync), and then choose the “Sync Baserow table” option. If every workspace or database, you can then create a new table that’s automatically synced with the staff members table. That will prevent duplicates data.

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Thanks, bram. Unfortunately we’ve concluded that we’re unable to continue with Baserow because it’s operating a closed system with regards to the underlying Pg database. I think it’s fair to say that Baserow “uses Postgres” rather than “works with Postgres”. We’ve now focusing on an open source project which works more closely, and openly, with Postgres but sadly doesn’t have some of rich features of Baserow.