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.

Preparation

Before you can query Airtable, you need to enable the Wrappers extension and store your credentials in Postgres.

Enable Wrappers

Make sure the wrappers extension is installed on your database:

create extension if not exists wrappers with schema extensions;

Enable the Airtable Wrapper

Enable the airtable_wrapper FDW:

create foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper
  handler airtable_fdw_handler
  validator airtable_fdw_validator;

Store your credentials (optional)

By default, Postgres stores FDW credentials inside 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.

Get your token from Airtable's developer portal.

-- 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>'
  );

Create a schema

We recommend creating a schema to hold all the foreign tables:

create schema if not exists airtable;

Entities

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

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

Usage

Get your base ID and table ID from your table's URL.

Note

Foreign tables must be lowercase, regardless of capitalization in Airtable.

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

Notes

• The table requires both base_id and table_id options
• Optional view_id can be specified to query a specific view

Query Pushdown Support

This FDW doesn't support query pushdown.

Limitations

This section describes important limitations and considerations when using this FDW:

• No query pushdown support, all filtering must be done locally
• Large result sets may experience slower performance due to full data transfer requirement
• No support for Airtable formulas or computed fields
• Views must be pre-configured in Airtable
• No support for Airtable's block features
• Materialized views using these foreign tables may fail during logical backups

Examples

Query an Airtable table

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

create foreign table airtable.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.airtable_table;

Query an Airtable view

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

create foreign table airtable.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.airtable_view;