I have a concern regarding the choice of our database for our Bubble application.
I am in the process of building an enterprise application for hotels. In general, our solution is most like a mix of a project management solution and a log record management solution. We will test the solution in January on several pilot organizations that will be onboarded to our solution.
In short, my concern is the following:
Can we start by hosting our solution on Bubble’s database and then later migrate the app data to e.g., a MySQL database later and still use Bubble for the front end and our logic layer without any significant costs and challenges?
We have built our database on a relational database structure and have only used inverse linking and joining tables to avoid the use of “lists”. In our design, our app consists of +30 tables (data types). I know that the different “data types” app data can be exported as CSV, but can this be used to migrate to an external database later?
We are huge fans of the freedom and flexibility that Bubble provides. Especially when we are about to test our solution and possibly add new features. However, we expect that in the long run, we will hopefully reach a size where we need to create a fully developed application that will require an external database.
I believe that from starting only you keep up with a external database because that will be more flexible and if you do the opposite the things out broke
You could start on Bubble and migrate. It might take some time and extra effort to do the migration since the relational structures are organized a bit differently in Bubble.
Generally I recommend everyone start their MVP using the Bubble Database. It is just so much faster to develop and build out the database right in Bubble. Further you don’t know that you will ever have a need to use an external DB. However, if you know from the start that you have a paying customer base (or you already have a large existing customer base) then I would highly recommend starting out on the external database right from the beginning.
I ran into the same issue. I started building my fairly large scale app then realized that there are certain filtering things I wanted to do that the Bubble DB was simply terrible at (Intersects etc.). So I am reworking everything for Supabase. There is an incredibly generous free cloud hosted version, and the nice thing is even the first level option is only $25. Beyond that, you can tack on small upgrades to it for increased processing power, dedicated CPU’s, etc.
For what I am doing, it is the right call, but it might not be right for everyone. The nice thing with Supabase is that you can run straight SQL commands which can be dynamically adjusted by Bubble, so it’s super flexible. The honest downside though is that unless you really need the power of an SQL database, your basic data calls will be slower. I am going to use a hybrid approach (SQL for heavy filtering, then Bubble DB for basic data calls).
So it’s entirely up to you, just my two cents! (well with inflation… it’s more like 2.25cents these days am i right?)…
