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Each generation of software has its own database company. It started with OracleDB in the 1980s, then you had MongoDB in the 2000s and Firebase in the 2010s. I think the database company of the 2020s is Supabase. I wanted to explore how they became so successful - this is what I found.

We're excited to release the 2023 State of Databases report. If you’re looking to learn what backend to use for your new project, thinking about how to make your company more productive, or merely curious to learn what developers value in data products, this report is for you.

Basedash was invited to Collision - one of the largest technology industry conferences in the world - as one of the “breakout startups” of 2023. There were a lot of impressive companies, so we were flattered to have the chance to present.

I’m excited to share that Basedash has raised $4.5M in seed funding. The round was led by Matrix with participation from Y Combinator, Form Capital, and Worklife, along with many prominent angels including the founders of Figma, Notion, and Bloom Tech.

This post is part of a series talking about my experience applying to and taking part in the Summer 2020 batch of Y Combinator with my company, Basedash.

Learn how we switched from Webflow to Framer for our website, and improved our blog workflow using a custom markdown component and Notion integration.

The Basedash survey for the 2023 State of Databases is now open. The report will cover the most commonly used databases, fastest-growing internal tools, and popular ORMs. Fill out the survey to enter a draw for a 27" Apple Studio Display.

Learn how we setup our TypeScript monorepo with yarn workspaces, shared configs, tRPC, and Turborepo to allow for code sharing and efficient builds.

Discover the best alternatives to Retool for creating internal tools in 2023. Explore 6 platforms including Basedash, Internal.io, Airplane.dev, Budibase, Jetadmin.io, and DronaHQ, and learn about their features, pricing, and pros and cons to make an informed decision for your business needs.

Learn about the challenges faced by Basedash in implementing re-ordering at the database level, and the solutions they tried out. Discover how they ultimately used floating point numbers to move a page between two other pages, and the possible improvements to ordering at the database level.

Kris explains how collaborative admin panels for databases can help teams work more efficiently, increase control over data, and improve collaboration. Admin panels allow non-technical team members to easily access and modify customer data while maintaining security. Centralizing data management can prevent errors and ensure everyone has access to the latest information.

Learn about how to unify related datasets using SQL when a Foreign Key is and isn't present in the tables you're looking to unify.

The first part of a series talking about my experience applying to and taking part in the Sumer 2020 batch of Y Combinator with my company, Basedash.

Learn how to set up your own instance of a MariaDB database on a DigitalOcean droplet by following these step-by-step instructions. Includes information on creating a Ubuntu droplet, setting up MariaDB on the server, and connecting to the database from a remote server.

A startup's primary focus is to build a foundation of core components that are resilient, adaptable, and can be combined to create an innovative and useful product, according to a blog post by Basedash. This is often misunderstood as being about creating a product people love.

Basedash reflects on their year of shipping dozens of changelog updates, connecting thousands of tables with hundreds of thousands of columns, and helping users save six and a half years of time building and maintaining internal tools.

If you have a means for constructing a plain HTTP request, and if you know how to transmit your query within it, you can work with a GraphQL server using plain HTTP.

Internal software development can be a powerful tool for businesses, especially if you have specific needs that widely-available software can’t address. This article will explain the advantages of a company taking an in-house approach, and whether the negatives outweigh them. While it’s not the right choice for every company, the benefits are hard to ignore.

Keeping track of the numerous processes that take place within your organization and promptly reporting on them can be challenging, especially since those processes are distributed across several systems. So why not build an internal tool and connect your data sources under one user interface (UI) to simplify and speed up your work processes?

PhpMyAdmin is a free and open-source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB, but as your needs scale, you might be looking for alternative products that help stay on top of your database's needs.

Sooner or later in development work, there comes a time where you just need a flowchart. Recently we started using Mermaid, a markdown syntax supported by Notion and Github to document and share and annotate new features in-line rather than having to use a design tool or draw them out by hand.

Doing user research is difficult in and of itself, but no matter how good your are at asking the right questions, gathering data, taking insights from research, and putting that data to use, one of the most important parts of user research is finding the right users to talk to in the first place.

Product analytics tools are failing startups. At an early stage (pre-product-market fit), aggregate data is a distraction.The cure? Entity-level data.

Internal tools take time, resources, effort, and often get very little resources to build, and less to improve and grow over time. Learn how our designer, Tom Johnson, has seen and felt the pain of building internal tools over his career and how Basedash solves those issues.

Internal tool product management is identifying a need for, creating, and managing internal tools that will fulfill the needs of multiple people at your company. It's one of the most intimidating product roles in tech startups, but it doesn’t need to be.

It's challenging to keep track of dozens, if not hundreds, of different business processes at any given moment, let alone provide a timely report on them. It’s always tricky because of how many processes across other systems are involved.Internal tools solve this business problem by integrating all the data sources they use under one user interface. In doing so, these tools streamline and speed up work for your employees and your business. This article will go into several benefits of building internal tools, what you need to consider, and how to build them.

Prisma’s migration system is great because it’s able to automatically generate SQL migrations based on changes to your schema.prisma file. However, it’s not always possible to understand your intentions when you make a change. In these cases, you have to manually edit the generated SQL migration. Most commonly, this happens when you want to rename a table or column in your database.

Last year we started using React Query for all of our API calls (and we talked about it in this article about optimizing API calls). However, the more we were using it, the more obvious it became that React Query was not providing the ideal structure for our data. We ended up moving away from React Query, and are much happier with our new setup.

Quick video showing how to build an internal app from scratch using Basedash.

With HIPAA and privacy laws becoming more and more stringent over the years, data security has become a critical factor in maintaining compliance. Implementing databases with robust edit history functions can play a pivotal role in protecting the integrity of medical data.

It’s likely you and your company have custom internal tools that are beginning to show their age. Here are some reasons to consider replacing them.

Choosing or building an admin panel can be hectic. Startups can leverage tools like Basedash to get a collaborative admin panel that anyone at the company can use.

Recently, we refactored our codebase at Basedash to fetch our server data with React Query and optimize our REST API calls in the process. The transition to React Query allowed for better code readability and the optimization of our API calls resulted in half the number of data fetching API calls...

In a startup, one of the most important qualities in the first team members is ownership—having incredibly bright, kind people who join you.

A no-code SQL GUI is a user interface that allows you to interact with a database without using code—in the case of most relational databases, this would be Structured Query Language (SQL). No code SQL GUIs are an excellent way for both newbies and SQL veterans to speed up and simplify the process of querying data.

Technical database knowledge can be a hurdle. Education can go a long way, but the solution primarily lies in creating user-friendly databases.

We’re no longer in the times when database manipulation, management, and interpretation were only to be done by admins. It's the 21st century, and both technical and non-technical users should be accommodated when planning database design and access.

There aren’t many designers out there who would advocate for working with less or no information about the product they’re building. We want to know who is using our product, what their motivations are, what kind of frustrations they might have, what work environment are they in, and what other tools...

An index is a data structure you can add to your SQL database that allows for quick retrieval of certain information. For example, if you have a database of names and phone numbers, an index might be created on the name column so that the database could quickly be searched for a particular student's phone number. You can think of this in the same way that a physical phone book works.

If you're working on a startup, chances are you've got a lot of internal tools that you've built or are in the process of building. And if you're like most startups, those tools are probably a hot mess. What tools will startups use in the next few years? We have a prediction on trends, tech, and emerging ideas in the space.

Refactoring our tables to be virutalized was a huge undertaking, with a huge upside. It sped up table performance by 500% and allowed Basedash to load tables that had previously caused the app to crash.

Internal tooling can be a quick solution to satisfy requirements for colleagues that lack the technical knowledge to build their own custom software. Let's look at how we can beyond simply viewing admin panels, audit logs, and simple CRUD operations -- and into the world of building for the end users that work alongside us each day.

There are many different types of internal tools that you can build. You might want to create a reporting tool for your marketing team, or maybe you need a way to quickly get customer data visible for your customer support team. Or, any number of business apps to help your colleagues manipulate data.

Inheritance is a design pattern commonly used in object-oriented programming which allows you to model entities that inherit certain properties or functions from a parent class. This can be incredibly useful for modeling entities which have multiple types, such as different types of activities to show in a feed.

You've built a solid DB, but your colleagues need to edit data without knowing SQL. Here's how to enabler them to make edits:

How we wrote our own utility with Typescript to take the Date primitive and transform it into a string for use inside of Basedash.

In customer support cases, we use Basedash to help get to the bottom of issues. With a bit of browsing, we can pull up Views, find user details, schema, table information, and take a look to see what the issue is.

A breakdown of the process of how the engineers at Basedash added the feature to allow workspaces to restrict signups based off of user email address.

Using our own product to query our databases speeds up our development time and gives us more opportunities to spot new ideas for features and improve our user's experience.

We recently added an easter egg to Basedash which shows ASCII art of our logo in the browser console. Here's how we we able to style our console.log message with CSS.

At Basedash we use Basedash itself for managing, adding, and removing feature flags for our product. These help use beta test new features, catch bugs, and get feedback before shipping new features.

I had the opportunity to chat with Liau Jian Jie, CTO & co-founder of Mobbin and talk about their migration from Firebase to SQL on Supabase earlier this year. Mobbin is a tool for designers to see and track UI flows from mobile applications to help with real-world inspiration for their own design work. I used it personally...

Startups can use whatever tools they want to do their job. We're not burdened by legacy contracts, enterprise-wide procurements, existing monolithic workflows, or the burden of training hundreds or thousands of staff for a new tool. We can change workflows on a dime. We can try something new...