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.
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:
_10create extension if not exists wrappers with schema extensions;
and then create the foreign data wrapper:
_10create foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper_10 handler airtable_fdw_handler_10 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.
_10-- Save your Airtable API key in Vault and retrieve the `key_id`_10insert into vault.secrets (name, secret)_10values (_10 'airtable',_10 '<Airtable API Key or PAT>' -- Airtable API key or Personal Access Token (PAT)_10)_10returning 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:
_10create server airtable_server_10 foreign data wrapper airtable_wrapper_10 options (_10 api_key_id '<key_ID>' -- The Key ID from above._10 );
Creating Foreign Tables
The Airtable Wrapper supports data reads from Airtable's Records endpoint (read only).
| Airtable | Select | Insert | Update | Delete | Truncate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Records | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
For example:
_10create foreign table my_foreign_table (_10 name text_10 -- other fields_10)_10server airtable_server_10options (_10 base_id 'appXXXX',_10 table_id 'tblXXXX'_10);
Foreign table 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.
Basic example
This will create a "foreign table" inside your Postgres database called airtable_table:
_12create foreign table airtable_table (_12 name text,_12 notes text,_12 content text,_12 amount numeric,_12 updated_at timestamp_12)_12server airtable_server_12options (_12 base_id 'appTc3yI68KN6ukZc',_12 table_id 'tbltiLinE56l3YKfn'_12);
You can now fetch your Airtable data from within your Postgres database:
_10select * from airtable_table;
We can also create a foreign table from an Airtable View called airtable_view:
_15create foreign table airtable_view (_15 name text,_15 notes text,_15 content text,_15 amount numeric,_15 updated_at timestamp_15)_15server airtable_server_15options (_15 base_id 'appTc3yI68KN6ukZc',_15 table_id 'tbltiLinE56l3YKfn',_15 view_id 'viwY8si0zcEzw3ntZ'_15);_15_15select * from airtable_view;