Introducing Dropbase Data Editor for Postgres

Data Editor for Postgres is targeted to engineering teams but designed to improve the collaboration workflows between engineering and ops teams. While read access to production databases are more commonly shared among fast moving teams today, write access is still a bottleneck today due to safety and data integrity concerns. Even for users with write access, there are still risks associated with editing the database. As a result, engineering teams place a safety layer between the database and the users that have write access to it. Safety layers manifest in multiple ways, including admin panels, internal tools, edit/import scripts, data validation forms, etc. Any single safety layer can reduce risk, but it often comes at the expense of building custom tools or writing additional code that need to be maintained and updated to address the changing needs of the business — even for the most basic of use cases, such as toggling a feature flag in your database, extending the number of trial days, or changing usage limits.

Dropbase lets engineering and ops teams who struggle to quickly update customer data in production databases to do so conveniently, safely, and collaboratively, while minimizing risk. We deliver a data editor experience that is lightweight, fast, and delightful to use. The data editor itself is easy to learn because it’s a deceivingly simple spreadsheet interface — a UI that has the smallest learning curve for most people. We sometimes refer to it as Dropbase smart tables.

If you need early access, you can request it here.

How do we enable safe edits?

Since our product targets engineering teams, we took inspiration from Git and software engineering workflows to enable safe edits on live systems. All edits happen in a safely staged table that mirrors your production tables. Users can also:

See a list of edits that result in data conflicts and an interface to easily resolve them. Conflicts can happen due to last second changes in production while we sync edits

Make commits, pull requests, and merge data back to prod (i.e. sync data)

Layer highly customizable, type-aware, and user-defined data validations on top of your tables. The data validation layer is in addition to any constraints and validations imposed by your production code and database native database constraints

A history/log of all data edits

Multiple permission levels, including Owner, Admins and Editors. Editor permissions can be granted to ops users who need to make edits but need an engineer to review the edits before merging them into the production tables

What's next?

We are building towards our vision of a Unified Data Editor (UDE). UDEs are cloud-based data editors that connect to production databases, SaaS apps, and APIs. UDEs let you safely and collaboratively edit your customer data across all your business systems from a unified interface — all without additional engineering effort in building admin panels, managing user access, or logging into multiple live systems.

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