Hi,

I selfhost a lot of tools for personal (and professional) use, so this surprised me, but maybe I am missing something regarding simple tools that are “open source enough” for relational databases.

My (small, broke) company has a problem with tools, and I figured that open source would be the answer, but if I look at the usual suspects that would allow for a simple way to create/update/sort/search clients and missions, that everyone could use, everything seems either very limited or very expensive (or both!).

I looked at the pricing for Baserow, Grist, NodoDB, Nocobase, and for 100 users and 5000 rows, it means around 12 000 euros per year to get something usable. And the open source selfhosted versions are quite limited everytime. I saw someone rage about open core some months ago, but never realized how true this was.

The only thing that seems truly open source (and a lot more limited than the others) is Mathesar. Maybe it will be good enough. There isn’t much content about it, I will have to look at the documentation to get a better feeling of what it can offer.

Is there some truly open source no code relational database tools around? Enough to create rows, have advanced (AND OR) search, and a tag system to look for “all clients in country X with type of mission Y in sector Z in 2024” or “all missions for clients A or B”

For those wondering, of course we have a tool to manage missions, clients, billing, etc. but it is truly awful, and I was hoping to propose something simple to manage search of past references, but nothing seems as easy as I thought it would.

  • PerplexedBrick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    What you wrote about search looks exactly like common SQL queries in relational database, also you mentioned that you are not alone working with this data so you’ll need to provide an access to that data to control who can do what.

    If you have any even completely inexperienced or aspiring developer inside your team they would be able to do something just fine, not fast though.

    I’m not sure how do you intend to use it precisely but you can also just create database and learn basics of SQL and I mean really basic stuff to just be able to join few tables.

    And then it’s not clear where you current data is persisted.

    For more complex scenarios you’ll probably need actual development.

    And one more thing, there is this thingy called excel. It can connect to datasources such as postgres, with a bit of tweaking and vlookup you can create really complex and detailed spreadsheets