[seancolsen]

Thanks! We have taken a lot of inspiration from Airtable -- but we've deliberately avoided calling ourselves an "Open Source Airtable alternative" because we are actually trying to stay more true to the concept of "relational data" than Airtable does. Airtable sweeps a lot under the rug. Primary keys and foreign keys are heavily abstracted in Airtable, giving rise to some surprising behavior for anyone more accustomed to actual databases.

In Mathesar, we want the abstractions to be as thin as possible, while still giving non-technical users the capability to model and edit their data. You can point Mathesar and an existing Postgres database and, as long as all the foreign keys are in place, you should be able to use it a lot like Airtable. But when you set up a new relationship between tables, you'll find that it works very differently in Mathesar than in basically any other spreadsheet-database hybrid tool.

One-to-many relationships use a foreign key column in one table (instead of in two tables in Airtable). Many-to-many relationships use two FK columns in a join table (instead of by showing a column in each of the two related tables). All of the data is kept normalized. That normalization can make it hard to work with the data though! So we are developing a robust graphical query builder (called the "Data Explorer") which lets you to see data joined across multiple tables.