# Industry news - players in this category

**URL:** <https://community.fibery.io/t/industry-news-players-in-this-category/391>\
**Category:** Misc\
**Created:** [November 5, 2019, 5:25am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/industry-news-players-in-this-category/391 "2019-11-05T05:25:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Shafqat\_Ullah](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/shafqat_ullah/32/101_2.png) [@Shafqat\_Ullah](https://community.fibery.io/u/Shafqat_Ullah)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2019, 5:25am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/industry-news-players-in-this-category/391/1 "2019-11-05T05:25:24Z")

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Hi,

Thought this article on AirTable is relevant for what potential Fibery has:

> **[No-one understood our idea, but now it's worth over $1bn](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50138290)**
>
> Howie Liu's firm Airtable wants to make spreadsheets so simple anyone can use them.

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**Author:** ![rickcogley](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/rickcogley/32/274_2.png) [@rickcogley](https://community.fibery.io/u/rickcogley)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2019, 2:45pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/industry-news-players-in-this-category/391/2 "2019-11-06T14:45:34Z")

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Interesting article. I’ve looked at AirTable a bit. It’s getting fairly polished (should be, given all that investment) and, has the ability to be built up somewhat flexibly into a database for your company ops. But at the same time, though I cannot put my finger on it, some schema-related aspects seemed inflexible. Also, it takes the approach of “blocks” which to me feel like Trello’s “power ups” in a way. They all appear to be free, but there’s something bolt-on-y about them. One lets you create a printable page so you can do something like print an invoice with line items or some report like that, but, if you don’t get the data right, you can’t print what you need.

Coming from a world of building traditional record-centric databases for business, certainly the likes of AirTable, SmartSheet, Coda, Notion are indeed pretty agile and pretty friction-free in that they let users create and edit records quickly, but, there’s one aspect that I’d really like to see Fibery nail, and that’s relational data integrity especially with regard to deletion. These apps let users delete data too easily, and there’s just no way to prevent users from doing really dumb things, eliminating vast swathes of data in a couple of clicks.

Deletion is a risky prospect in a relational database. Generally I build my databases to disallow it, and instead add a process to make a record “inactive” or “archived” or “obsolete”. When records are marked so, you have to go to a special place to view them. I hope Fibery will eventually handle this better than the others.

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**Author:** ![Holger\_Winkelmann](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/community.fibery.io/holger_winkelmann/32/1524_2.png) [@Holger\_Winkelmann](https://community.fibery.io/u/Holger_Winkelmann)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2021, 7:54pm UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/industry-news-players-in-this-category/391/3 "2021-02-20T19:54:50Z")

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With the small difference that Fibery is more like MS access the Excel 😉