Self-hosted: ability to use own DB with Retool UX without re-creating the DB

💬 Feature Requests
1

This is not the smoothest experience for self-hosted deployment btw. When I deploy my Retool and desire the nice retool layout/UX for interacting/viewing my DB, I shouldn't have to create a NEW db and now have to point everything else there, as the source of truth. The UX should be available to be used with any existing "external" DB. (e.g. my db is the same RDS/cluster/VPC/cloudformation and still it's forcing me to create a new DB!)

Also, there's nothing pointing to this documentation from the self-hosted How-To documentation. Very frustrating to suddenly discover this missing functionality!!!

3

Hey @Ori - we do have limited documentation on this feature, but I agree that it creates a less than ideal user experience. :

I've known for a while that RetoolDB could be pointed towards any existing host, but only recently realized that it required the creation of a new user and database. It's fairly straightforward to migrate the data with pg_dump, but definitely more of a pain to point your other infrastructure to that new DB.

I'd be happy to assist with the migration, if you do want to move forward with it, and can additionally enable any of the experimental feature flags related to RetoolDB.

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Regardless, I'll document this feedback for our Resource team and get some more context as to the why it works this way.

4

This might be of interest, @Ori. It describes how to change the underlying connection string for an existing RetoolDB resource.

5

I'm going to mark the above as the "Solution" to this particular topic, because it technically allows you to point RetoolDB towards any existing DB, but recognize that there is an opportunity to support this natively. I've documented that fact internally and will provide an update here as soon as I'm able!