April 16, 2021Connecting to a database can be difficult, involving trusted sources, credentials, certificates, and more, depending on your setup. We've added inline instructions and videos on how to find some of this information while connecting a data source in BaseDash.
Specifically, we now show text and video instructions on:
We currently have videos for all major managed database hosting providers with plans to add more in the future.
April 9, 2021BaseDash now has a public Slack community! We'll be using this to share tips and updates to the tool, and showing off some sneak peeks of product changes before they go live. It's a great place to chat with the team and other power users about the future of BaseDash, and how to use the tool to its full potential.
We try to be incredibly responsive to bug reports and feature requests. Let us know what's been bugging you in the #bugs channel, and what you'd like to see us add in #feature-requests.
Join the Slack community here—we're looking forward to meeting you!
April 2, 2021Adding a database is the first step of using BaseDash, yet it's one of the most difficult. We decided to totally redesigned the flow to make it simpler and to give more useful information while moving through the process.
We now ask you where your database is hosted so that we can automatically fill default values wherever possible, update form labels to match how they're presented by hosting providers, and link directly to your hosting provider's dashboard. We also plan to add inline videos showing how to find credentials for each hosting provider.
April 1, 2021Expanding on last week's redesigned activity page, this week we decided to implement our most requested feature: stories. Stories let you quickly share snapshots of your views and queries from across your workspace. They're great for sharing wins like notable user signups and usage milestones. Stories disappear after 24 hours since they're meant to show relevant data in real time.
Of course, stories are fully keyboard-navigable—just press C then S to instantly create a story based off the page you're currently on. You can view active stories in your workspace on the Activity page along with your edit history.
We're excited to hear your feedback and see how you use stories to share insights across your team!
March 26, 2021Being able to see activity within your workspace is incredibly valuable for teams using BaseDash. It lets you get a pulse for how your teammates are using the tool, and makes it easy to catch mistakes before they have an impact on your product.
We fully redesigned the activity page to show more context around edits, with things like checkboxes for booleans, nicely formatted dates, and properly indented JSON. This makes it much easier to quickly compare the before and after values of edits.
We have even more changes planned for the activity page that aren't quite ready to ship yet. Keep your eye out for future changelogs by following us on Twitter.
March 19, 2021Our vision at BaseDash is to build the new standard for internal tools which enables everyone within a company to easily access the data they need to. Achieving this vision requires everybody from large companies, to early startups, to individuals working on side projects, to be able to use BaseDash. Our old pricing model was too prohibitive to certain small companies, so we decided to rethink it from the ground up.
Our new pricing model is designed to scale both functionality and cost in a way that makes sense for teams of all sizes. Our goal was to only include limitations for features that actually matter depending on your team size (e.g. unlimited edit history for startups, on-prem deployment for enterprise). Beyond that, we don't place any limits on the way you use the tool.
We also offer significant discounts/free access to non-profits and free open-source software projects on a case-by-case basis. Email us for more details.
We hope these changes allow more teams to use BaseDash to improve their internal tools.
March 12, 2021We totally revamped our toast system to show context around each edit you make, with the value before and after each change. If you make multiple edits in quick succession, we'll group them together into a single toast with controls to individually undo edits as needed. We think that showing a quick snapshot of each edit you make will reduce errors and increase speed and confidence in taking actions.
This update also improves error messages by grouping them together into a single toast, saving you valuable screen real-estate.
March 5, 2021This week we added a global search that allows you to jump to any view, query, or table in seconds. It's fully keyboard-navigable and can be opened from the sidebar, or by pressing '/' from anywhere. With this addition, you can now navigate to any page in BaseDash purely with the keyboard.
This is the first of a few updates we have planned to improve navigation and organization of views. We think that views are core to BaseDash, so we want to improve the ways that you can work with them. Keep an eye out for future updates by following us on Twitter.
Speed is core to BaseDash—we've got loads of keyboard shortcuts for navigation, creation, and manipulation. This week we added a central location to show all available shortcuts in an instant. It automatically detects which shortcuts are triggerable depending on where in the app you are, and lets you search to find specific actions.
You can open the cheat sheet by pressing '?', or by searching for "Keyboard shortcuts" in the command bar.
February 26, 2021We noticed that some users have large numbers of tables across multiple schemas in their database. Until now, we were organizing these in the sidebar by showing the full schema and table name for each list item in the sidebar (e.g. "public / Users"). This worked, but the repeated schema names looked ugly and often resulted in table names overflowing past the sidebar.
This week, we added a second level of organization in the sidebar for database schemas. We automatically detect any schemas in your database and create folders for them which can be individually expanded to show the tables within. This should greatly simplify navigation in big databases with multiple schemas.
If you only use a single schema (like "public"), you won't notice a difference since we flatten the structure to save you a click.
February 19, 2021We added autocomplete to our SQL query editor to make it easier than ever to quickly explore data in your database. It automatically suggests table and column names as you type—just hit Enter to fill the selected value. It also automatically quotes any values that use capital letters to ensure that your query runs correctly.
This should significantly speed up the process of writing queries and reduce the amount of debugging required to get your query to pull the data you want.
