A few weeks ago, I talked about Airtable AI which stole the limelight at Airtable’s launch event. During that announcement was an even bigger feature that went unnoticed: Data Library & two-way sync. I believe this is Airtable’s big pitch to Enterprise: we’ll solve your multiple sources of truth problem.
How many sources of truth do we have?
A big challenge in any organization is unreliable data. Let’s use a conference as an example: you have attendees, speakers, a schedule. Attendees are constantly being added through your website, added by sales people. Answering the question “What is the latest list of attendees” should be easy, but given the number of tools and sources at play, it’s surprisingly hard. Things are always in flux! So you end up with 8 spreadsheets or 4 Asana boards and everyone’s working off of their own understanding of what is “true”.
Now you, the enterprising Airtable expert, know how to build a source of truth of for an event. You’ll take all of these sources and create a table that is always up-to-date pulling from your website, your mailing list, a form where manual invites can be added etc., etc.
Great, congrats. However, no one knows that you’ve done that! Even worst, what if someone else has built a competing single source of truth because you both weren’t aware of each other’s work?
Single source of truths are useless unless others
1/ are aware of their existence,
2/ agree that they are sources of truth and
3/ use them!
Airtable’s Data Library is a way of solving all of these at once.
Vetted, usable and easily accessible sources of truth
Before the Data Library, there was no way of sharing within Airtable that you’ve created a source of truth that others can use. You were limited to pinning it atop a Slack channel. I’ve had the question “How do I let others know that they can sync this table to their base?” often in the Ultimate Guide to Airtable (especially in large orgs where competing sources of truth are prevalent). Unfortunately the only answer was “Aggressively tell people about its existence.”
Now you can add any table (more precisely, any view) to the Data Library. I manage livestreams at Webflow so I can create a “Webflow livestreams” single source of truth.
Once added, anyone creating a new table can sync from this source:
The value here is the assumption that anything in the Data Library has been reviewed by the appropriate teams and that it can be trusted.
Furthermore, you can enable the new two way sync to allow folks syncing the view to further enhance it with their updates (although I’d be very careful about that). I fully expect Airtable to add a feature where IT or some central administrator can vet anything added to the Data Library so everyone can work off of the same data.
I’ve said it and I’ll say it again: creating a single source of truth is easy, getting everyone to use it is the hard part. Airtable’s Data Library is a great step forward in making it easier to disseminating trusted sources of truth.
Now if I could only convince people to actually use Airtable (properly)…
The Enterprise only question
Both two way sync and the Data Library are Enterprise only features. I frankly don’t know how to feel about this. Airtable has long dropped any pretense of being a prosumer tool, and is now squarely an enterprise product. And I’m sure the Data Library and two way sync helps sell enterprise seats.
My fear here is that with every change of the website and every gated feature, Airtable loses its community of potential power users who don’t work at a fortune 500 company. I don’t know if I would have ever signed up for an Airtable account if I landed on airtable.com/home for the first time today. And that would mean that I wouldn’t be migrating 3-4 workflows every month to Airtable in an enterprise setting today.
As much as I’m excited that Airtable keeps adding power to me, the current enterprise user, I worry that it’s cutting its growth amongst the very people who they need in the future to implement these features.
