A non-profit I work with is looking for a cloud-based database app: store ~5k rows of data, authenticated access for upto 500 employees, straightforward GUI. Some quick searching suggests Zoho Corporation could do the job well, others have recommended Airtable. Any other suggestions?

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Could you provide a bit more context and details around the type of data that will be stored and will it always be ~5k rows or is there an expected growth rate?

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Depends on the sophistication of your IT/devops folks. For myself, AWS RDS is a no-brainer but requires someone who knows AWS. In ten minutes I can have a fully managed Aurora (Amazon’s flavor of MySQL) up and running that’s capable of 90k TPS. Because it’s standard MySQL you can use any of the great GUIs out there.

Your needs are much smaller (I.e. 5k rows) so pretty much any DB will work.

The first question really is what is the sophistication of your team, then match the solution to that.

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I’d caution against Airtable if it will have sensitive information like authenticated access. They haven’t caught up enough yet on the security side. Other growing early-stage companies (that you may run into similar problems with) are Monday.com and Notion. Can also look at using Trello or Asana since it’s not that much data.

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Smartsheet has come a long way from being just a project management tool to having a good set of Templates for workflows including forms and datasheets

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Another one for smart sheets, there are lots of integrations available to use with other tools/services.

Amazon WS offers Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS which may work.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/

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Agree with Mike Prin. AWS RDS is what I will use if I were you. Lot of firms that can help make the onboarding journey and maintaining easy there onwards

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Check out offerings from Azure...pricing is competitive, options for nonprofit, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/mysql/

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I'd consider a non-conventional approach: use Amazon's S3 Select to issue SQL queries directly to a file in S3. Given that we are only talking about 5,000 rows of data, a database sounds like overkill. Regarding permissions, there are ample solutions for access control in S3, including bucket policies and roles. If you need credentials to be transient, or need to integrate with an existing identity service, see AWS's AssumeRole documentation. If you need to optimize performance (and queries only focus on a subset of columns), consider storing the data in the Parquet format. Note that if you plan to exceed several thousand requests per second, you will likely need to "shard" the data across buckets--this remains simpler than sharding Postgres :)

The key point is that S3 Select is low-cost and simpler than administering a database. The general trend in query workloads is to separate expensive compute from low-cost storage using "schema-on-read" systems--and this is exactly what systems like S3 Select, Drill, and PrestoDB do. You can further address versioning and roll-back by using S3 object versioning to store changes to the "database" in-place.

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Bubble.is is not a database app, but if I understood you right you want database with easy to create interfaces integrated. For this case, Bubble.is is a good option.

A non-profit I work with is looking for a cloud-based database app: store ~5k rows of data, authenticated access for upto 500 employees, straightforward GUI. Some quick searching suggests Zoho Corporation could do the job well, others have recommended Airtable. Any other suggestions?

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