Mathesar User Feedback

@user-feedback

Public team

Joined on Mar 22, 2023

  • Introduction The goal of this document is to establish an understanding of our targeted niches for Mathesar and our approach towards their needs. We aim to start with a focused set of users in a specific niche, perfect the product for their needs, and then scale to other niches. As we learn from our users and refine our process, we'll also encourage feedback to drive our feature development. Integration of User Growth Strategy with Niche Selection "Focusing on growth rather than sustainability is the better idea right now because a higher number of users will help us get the funding we need from foreign foundations and major donors." Our user growth strategy is directly tied to the specific niches we focus on. Key considerations for each niche include:
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  • Category: Feature, User Experience User: steckdenis Source: GitHub Discussion Feedback Content Hello, (first, thanks for the wonderful tool that Mathesar is!) My use-case for this feature is also linked to #2289 and #2288. I'm working in a decently-sized group of people (about 50 people), and we regularly use dozens of Excel sheets to administrate personnel, projects, deliverables, outcomes, lectures and other organizational stuff. Finding these Excel sheets, producing reports (so only selecting a few columns) and doing joints is very very difficult for now. We are actively looking for a tool that has the exact features of Mathesar, but its permission system is currently what prevents us from using it.
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  • Discovery Survey The discovery survey should be short and simple, with a few questions to gather basic information about the user's experience with Mathesar and other tools. The survey should be sent to users who are unable to participate in a discovery call. The goals of they survey are to: Gather basic information about the user's experience with Mathesar and other tools. Understand the user's role and responsibilities related to data management. Understand the user's primary use case for Mathesar. Segment users based on their primary use case for Mathesar. Gather feedback and suggestions for Mathesar.
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  • Category: Installation User: Dave Lotterer Source: Installation help call Feedback Content He found the prerequisite of having SSH access (a bash prompt) difficult or impossible. He has other ways of installing software on that server (using the Softalucous software manager). He didn't understand that we couldn't install our software through that manner. While it's possible he's not technically a user for us at the moment, his use-case (see below) is right up our alley, and his confusion is completely valid from his perspective. Context (Optional) (from a call)
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  • :::info :bulb: This template is for capturing and organizing feedback found online, such as on the web, social media channels, or review sites. ::: Category: (e.g., product, service, feature, user experience) User: (e.g., username, reviewer, or anonymous if not available) Source: (e.g., post URL, review site URL, link to discussion) Feedback Content :::success Paste the feedback content that is relevant. Do not modify the text; keep it verbatim. If the feedback is too long or contains multiple points, consider breaking it down into individual items or summarizing key points.
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  • Invitation Funnel The invitation funnel should be set up to ensure that we can reach as many users as possible and that we can engage them in a way that works for them. Not every invited user may be able or willing to participate in a discovery call. We can employ a funnel approach to engage users in different ways, depending on their availability and interest. For users who are willing but unable to join a discovery call, we can explore alternative methods to gather their feedback. Additionally, we can ask users who are unwilling to participate in a call to consider completing a survey or inviting others who might be interested in joining a discovery call. Initial Invitation: We send an email to the user inviting them to participate in a discovery call. Follow-up Invitation: If the user doesn't respond to the initial invitation, we can send a follow-up email after a few days. At this point, we can also include a link to a survey or a link to invite other users to participate in a discovery call. Final Invitation: If the user doesn't respond to the follow-up invitation, we can send a final email after a few days. We can also include a link to a survey or a link to invite other users to participate in a discovery call and inform about available channels for future contact.
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  • Goals The user in this case has expressed their interest regarding a specific feature, in this case <database security>, and has suggested that Mathesar implements it. We want to know the following: Is <database security> a deal-breaker for them? Is it determining their decision to switch to Mathesar? What are the details of the feature they want to see implemented? What are the pain points they've experienced with other tools that they would like to see addressed through this feature? What are the other concerns they have that are not addressed by this feature? Why aren't those features as important to them as this one? What are the other tools they've looked at and how do they compare to Mathesar?
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  • Category: Feature Request Users kubeworkz (Cloud infrastructure / DevOps specialists) htbrown (Full-stack developer and computer science student) dalemccrory (Non-profit organization) Source: Mathesar Discussion Feedback Content htbrown: I'm a single user looking to spin up something similar to Airtable which integrates with my Keycloak/Active Directory combination so I can have a single account for all my services for the sake of simplicity. If this were to be included in Mathesar, do you know whether you'd consider using OIDC for this feature?
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  • Category: Installation User: SatisfyMyMind Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/11n2fxx/mathesar_intuitive_ui_for_managing_data_for_users/ Feedback Content I tried to install this last week and after a couple attempts I had to abandon. I'd really love to try this but that interactive installer is terrible. I don't remember the exact error I was getting, but I know it failed every time and I had to start the interactive installer again every single time, making it extremely tedious. I think it's just better to provide a docker-compose file with default values, document all options and let the user set it up as they want.
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  • Category: Feature Request User: derefr User details: About: Levi Aul. Vancouver, Canada. CTO of Covalent (https://covalenthq.com). We provide data-analytics APIs for blockchains and other OSINT datasets. Feedback Content "I've been in the market for a while now for a webapp you can run on a server, that presents a UX for submitting, watching the progress, and managing, long-running schema changes / data migrations (think: index creations, table re-partitionings) that have been written out as long screeds of custom SQL, and then either submitted through said UI, or which are uploaded to the server out-of-band and then pointed at." Context (Optional) N/A
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  • Category: Comparison and Discussion User: @hc_redveg Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/3rv3mu/airtable_vs_baserow_and_others_eg_rowy_nocodb_etc/ Feedback Content "Wow Mathesar looks really great. I will give it a try. Looking forward to the API release." Context (Optional) N/A Related GitHub Issue(s) (if applicable)
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  • Category: Missing Functionality User: @perguth Source: N/A Feedback Content "An ‘undo’ function even in its most simple form would help and provide a GUI way to recover from errors resulting from DB inputs or transformations… Since a proper undo function could be complicated to implement even a simple ‘quick save’ function that creates a save point and allows for a recovery later on like in various games would already be great (or maybe even the better solution)!” Context (Optional) User is a Sponsor of Mathesar Related GitHub Issue(s) (if applicable)
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  • Category: Feature Suggestion User: hultner User details: About: Founding CEO of ⠠⠵ Hultnér Technologies AB. Currently living in Sweden. @ahultner https://twitter.com/ahultner Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999774 Feedback Content "Looks cool however I don’t like that it needs to be setup with a super-user and that it’s limited to your three predetermined access roles. I have a project in mind where this tool could be useful but everything is built with row level security policies and roles, the database includes sensitive data and authentication user for the connection have basically no access by itself, so it looks like Mathesar wouldn’t be useful here. I also know of another similar project heavily utilizing RLS where end users actually have a 1:1 database user with access to their own data, here something like Mathesar could be nice as well if it would play nice with ACL/RLS." Context (Optional)
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  • Category: Suggestion User: hrj Source: GitHub Issue #2427 Comment Feedback Content If the main goal is to avoid asking for super user permission in the install script (as found in a comment on HN), then you don't need to change a lot of things. Say hello to podman. It lets you run docker containers without super user permissions. Just guide your users to install that instead of docker. Also you could detect its presence in the installation script and skip the sudo accordingly.
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  • Category: Feature Request User: abakhru Source: GitHub Issue #2633 Feedback Content Problem helm chart based installation for k8s would be great Proposed solution helm chart
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  • Category: Installation Process User: ovizii Source: Reddit Post Feedback Content Please, why do we need to read through your bash script to figure out what it does when you could just provide a docker-compose.yml file? I found this one https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/blob/develop/docker-compose.yml but since it is not mentioned in the docs, I need to read through and see what I can remove from it like I don't need caddy or watchtower and see if I can get it to work. I see it contains 3 profiles :-( way too complicated for trying right now. Thanks, I will follow your progress. I get your idea, but before I run a bash scrip off the internet, I need to check what it does and that is a pain in the a** if you don't use bash regularly. Lots of googling, checking what the next line of the script does, etc.
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  • Category: Feature Request User: MarkCupitt Source: GitHub Issue #2716 Feedback Content We are using Teleport to protect our operational and production systems, and it would probably be a very good idea if you could support it. Teleport is a secure proxy, that implements RBAC to determine who gets to see whats behind it. When it calls an application, it provides a [ RFD ] JWT in a header called teleport-jwt-assertion which allows for a good level of user cred integration and role propagation We would love to leverage this capability to extend roles and permissions into Mathesar. As you are very aware, database security is very difficult to implement effectively without handing out passwords, so the ability to map a role supplied by teleport to a database user, schema and password to access the db would be incredibly useful as long as it was secure and encrypted in storage
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  • Category: Suggestion User: perguth (Mathesar Sponsor) Source: GitHub Issue #2697 Feedback Content Problem More than once I deleted a table by accident instead of deleting the record as intended. Proposed solution Tables should have a higher protection level. Eg. by "copy and paste the name into this input field" like Github does it when deleting repositories.
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  • Category: Feature Request User: perguth Source: GitHub Issue #2754 Feedback Content Problem When selecting today as the default value for a column it sets the default to the current days date. Proposed solution When selecting a default value for a column it would be helpful to keep today as meaning "always the date on which the new record will be created" (default CURRENT_DATE in SQL) instead of translating it into the concrete date of today.
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  • Category: Feature Suggestion User: metasj User details: About: Sam Klein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:sj Feedback Content "The schema migrations are a delight. And I appreciate the shoutout to Dabble! Thanks for working on this + congrats on the release. An optimized hosted version with permalinks to Explorer views would open access to even more users." Context (Optional) N/A
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