For those who are unaware, we declared 2023 to be Glide’s Year of Power.
It’s gone pretty well.
We added new large-scale data sources with Glide BigQuery and Big Tables. We made your Glide apps automatically adaptive to work across all devices. We introduced new custom action workflows and native integrations.
We added Call API support in the summer, so you can connect directly to external services without using a 3rd party, and most recently, we launched Glide AI, so you can add AI features to your apps without worrying about model configuration or performance optimization.
As we come to the end of 2023, it’s nice to circle back to what we shipped early in the year: support for large-volume data sources.
SQL data sources are something we’ve wanted to add for a while. Larger teams have asked for it. They already use SQL in production, and they want to build Glide apps on top of that data.
We’re excited to say it’s now available, in beta, for our Enterprise teams. Supported SQL data sources, at the time of writing, include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Google Cloud SQL.
After setting up your SQL connection, you can pull an entire table as a read-write data source, or you can write a custom SQL query to pull what you need as read-only data.
Your SQL data shows up as a table in the Data editor alongside other tables. From there, you can work with your SQL data like you would any other data table. You can build relations between tables, extend tables with integrations and computed columns, etc.
Note: There are some limitations. For example, you can’t build relations or perform rollups on computed columns. A popular workaround is to run calculations and computations server-side and then work with the results of those calculations and computations within Glide.
Your SQL data isn’t stored in Glide. Instead, Glide runs a query against your data source and loads the results for you to work with.
This happens when you load your SQL data in the builder and when a user loads that data for the first time in your app. You can manually refresh the data by using a Reload Query action.
Watch the recording of our Glide Next launch event as special guest Yasin Hassanien from Voktech shows us how to connect Glide to PostgreSQL and Google Cloud SQL. Highlights include:
Using ChatGPT to help write custom SQL queries
Running SQL computations and calculations server-side
Using Glide alongside Google Cloud SQL and Looker Data Studio
…and more.
Want to try SQL data sources in Glide? Get in touch with our team.
Want to learn more about SQL data sources? Refer to our docs.
Have questions about this session? Join the discussion in our community.
