Airtable

Airtable is an easy-to-use online platform for creating and sharing relational databases.

The Airtable Wrapper allows you to read data from your Airtable bases/tables within your Postgres database.

Warning

Restoring a logical backup of a database with a materialized view using a foreign table can fail. For this reason, either do not use foreign tables in materialized views or use them in databases with physical backups enabled.

Preparation

Before you get started, make sure the wrappers extension is installed on your database:

create extension if not exists wrappers with schema extensions;

and then create the foreign data wrapper:

create foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper
  handler airtable_fdw_handler
  validator airtable_fdw_validator;

Secure your credentials (optional)

By default, Postgres stores FDW credentials inide pg_catalog.pg_foreign_server in plain text. Anyone with access to this table will be able to view these credentials. Wrappers is designed to work with Vault, which provides an additional level of security for storing credentials. We recommend using Vault to store your credentials.

-- Save your Airtable API key in Vault and retrieve the `key_id`
insert into vault.secrets (name, secret)
values (
  'airtable',
  '<Airtable API Key or PAT>' -- Airtable API key or Personal Access Token (PAT)
)
returning key_id;

Connecting to Airtable

We need to provide Postgres with the credentials to connect to Airtable, and any additional options. We can do this using the create server command:

With VaultWithout Vault

create server airtable_server
  foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper
  options (
    api_key_id '<key_ID>' -- The Key ID from above.
  );

create server airtable_server
  foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper
  options (
    api_key '<your_api_key>'
  );

Creating Foreign Tables

The Airtable Wrapper supports data reads from the Airtable API.

Records

The Airtable Wrapper supports data reads from Airtable's Records endpoint (read only).

Operations

Airtable	Select	Insert	Update	Delete	Truncate
Records	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌

Usage

create foreign table my_foreign_table (
  name text
  -- other fields
)
server airtable_server
options (
  base_id 'appXXXX',
  table_id 'tblXXXX'
);

Options

The full list of foreign table options are below:

• base_id - Airtable Base ID the table belongs to, required.
• table_id - Airtable table ID, required.
• view_id - Airtable view ID, optional.

Query Pushdown Support

This FDW doesn't support query pushdown.

Examples

Some examples on how to use Airtable foreign tables.

Query an Airtable table

This will create a "foreign table" inside your Postgres database called airtable_table:

create foreign table airtable_table (
  name text,
  notes text,
  content text,
  amount numeric,
  updated_at timestamp
)
server airtable_server
options (
  base_id 'appTc3yI68KN6ukZc',
  table_id 'tbltiLinE56l3YKfn'
);

You can now fetch your Airtable data from within your Postgres database:

select * from airtable_table;

Query an Airtable view

We can also create a foreign table from an Airtable View called airtable_view:

create foreign table airtable_view (
  name text,
  notes text,
  content text,
  amount numeric,
  updated_at timestamp
)
server airtable_server
options (
  base_id 'appTc3yI68KN6ukZc',
  table_id 'tbltiLinE56l3YKfn',
  view_id 'viwY8si0zcEzw3ntZ'
);

You can now fetch your Airtable data from within your Postgres database:

select * from airtable_view;