Unlocking the Power of Low Code/No Code with Budibase and YugabyteDB

In this blog, we’ll explore how Budibase and YugabyteDB can be combined to build a robust low code/no code app. We’ll highlight how this approach can help business users streamline operations, reduce costs, and achieve faster time-to-market—all while ensuring data consistency and reliability.

The Power of Low Code/No Code With Budibase

Budibase is a powerful, open source low code/no code platform that allows users to design, build, and deploy applications with ease.

With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Budibase democratizes app development, enabling business users to create functional applications without needing to write extensive code. This capability is particularly valuable for organizations that need to quickly adapt to changing business requirements, or automate repetitive tasks.

Key benefits of using Budibase for low code/no code development:

• Rapid Prototyping and Development: Business users can quickly build and iterate on applications, reducing the time it takes to bring new solutions to market.
• Cost Efficiency: By eliminating the need for specialized developers, organizations can save on development costs while still creating powerful applications.
• Ease of Use: Budibase’s user-friendly interface makes it accessible to non-technical users, enabling more people within the organization to contribute to application development.
• Flexibility: Budibase supports a wide range of integrations and allows users to connect their applications to various data sources, including databases like YugabyteDB.

Why YugabyteDB is the Ideal Partner for Budibase

YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database that offers high availability, horizontal scalability, and strong consistency—all critical features for enterprise-grade applications. When paired with Budibase, YugabyteDB provides a robust backend that ensures your applications can handle large volumes of data and transactions without compromising on performance.

Why YugabyteDB is an excellent choice for powering low code/no code applications:

• Scalability: YugabyteDB’s distributed architecture allows it to scale horizontally, ensuring it can handle growing data demands as your application expands. This is especially important for order management systems, which often experience fluctuations in data volume.
• High Availability: With built-in data replication across multiple nodes, YugabyteDB ensures that your application remains available even in the event of hardware failures. This guarantees uninterrupted service for business-critical applications.
• PostgreSQL Compatibility: YugabyteDB is fully compatible with PostgreSQL, which means it integrates seamlessly with Budibase. Users can leverage the rich ecosystem of PostgreSQL tools and extensions, while still benefiting from the advanced capabilities of YugabyteDB.
• Transactional Consistency: YugabyteDB provides strong ACID transactions, ensuring that your data remains consistent and reliable. This is crucial for applications like order management systems, where data integrity is crucial.
• Global Data Distribution: YugabyteDB allows you to deploy your data across multiple regions, ensuring low-latency access for users around the world. This feature is particularly beneficial for businesses with a global customer base.

How it Works

We took a user-friendly order tracking system with an integrated maker-checker approval process that ensured all order updates and changes are reviewed and approved before being finalized. YugabyteDB provides the robust backend necessary for storing and managing these order details securely and consistently across distributed systems.

Let us explore how this setup and application works with YugabyteDB and Budibase.

1. Setup Budibase using either cloud or the self-hosted options mentioned in this link. In our example I have used docker, docker-compose with self-hosted option.
2. Install YugabyteDB using one of these options:
   1. Docker container or standalone instance
   2. YugabyteDB Aeon (using Sandbox cluster)
   3. YugabyteDB Standard or Enterprise (if you already have a license).Please refer to the quick start section of YugabyteDB document link.
3. After installing Budibase, log-in to Budibase with default credentials or the custom credentials that you created, and create a new application from this page (create new app).
   
4. After you have created your new app, it will show the data tab and press + sign to add the data sources for the application. Click Postgresql connector and enter the YugabyteDB Details (e.g. my DB credentials are 10.23.16.6, yugabyte/yugabyte).
   
5. We developed a straightforward application using Budibase and Yugabyte in a remarkably short time—within an hour. This app includes an order management system with a maker-checker workflow, enabling seamless visualization, creation, and approval of orders, as demonstrated below.
   Click ‘New Order’ to open new order details to captured
   ‘View Order’ will help the Maker/Checker to edit the order status (Approve/Reject)
   
6. We can see the database objects created in YugabyteDB from Budibase and observe that data is flowing to the backend flawlessly.

   [root@40d2e5b0ba1e bin]# ./ysqlsh -h $(hostname -i)
   yugabyte=# \d
                 List of relations
    Schema |     Name     |   Type   |  Owner
   --------+--------------+----------+----------
    public | Order        | table    | yugabyte
    public | Order_id_seq | sequence | yugabyte
   
   yugabyte=# \d "Order"
                          Table "public.Order"
       Column    |            Type             | Collation | Nullable |               Default
   --------------+-----------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------------------------------
    id           | integer                     |           | not null | nextval('"Order_id_seq"'::regclass)
    Order_id     | real                        |           |          |
    Order_value  | real                        |           |          |
    Order_Status | text                        |           |          |
    Order_Date   | timestamp without time zone |           |          |
   Indexes:
       "Order_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, lsm (id HASH)
   
   
   yugabyte=# select * from "Order";
    id  | Order_id | Order_value | Order_Status |       Order_Date
   -----+----------+-------------+--------------+-------------------------
      1 |     1002 |      205233 | Active       | 2024-08-13 07:02:23
    101 |     2332 |       33253 | a            | 2024-08-17 07:14:47.531
    401 |      221 |       23235 | A            | 2024-08-18 16:36:34.822
    501 |     5555 |         525 | B            | 2024-08-12 16:37:04.96
    301 |      400 |       23623 | Pending      | 2024-08-31 09:30:06.361
    601 |     1005 |          90 | Active       | 2024-08-20 15:51:14.583
    201 |      235 |         523 | 23123        | 2024-08-14 07:15:05.768
   (7 rows)

Potential Use Cases Using Budibase and YugabyteDB

These use cases are the ideal fit for leveraging Budibase with YugabyteDB. The solution is particularly well-suited for low-code/no-code applications that can rapidly address data integration, data entry, and data correction needs, and applications requiring scalable data distribution across multiple geographies, from small-scale projects to large enterprise-level systems.

The combination of Budibase and YugabyteDB empowers organizations to efficiently solve complex challenges while ensuring scalability, reliability, and seamless global data distribution.

1. Use Case: Metadata Correction in a Data Lake with YugabyteDB and Budibase

   Challenge: As data is ingested into a data lake from multiple sources, metadata inconsistencies, incompleteness can arise. These issues pose significant challenges for data discovery, governance, and downstream processing, which potentially compromises the quality and usability of the data.

   Solution: By leveraging Budibase and YugabyteDB, organizations can implement an efficient metadata correction process. YugabyteDB’s robust distributed database architecture ensures that metadata stored in the data lake is consistently accurate, complete, and reliable. Budibase, with its intuitive low-code platform, facilitates the rapid creation of applications that can manage, validate, and correct metadata seamlessly. This approach is essential for maintaining high data quality, enabling precise data discovery, and ensuring effective governance across the entire data lake ecosystem.

2. Use Case: E-commerce Order Tracking with Budibase and YugabyteDB

   Challenge: E-commerce businesses require an efficient and lightweight order tracking system to manage and monitor orders seamlessly. Ensuring that order details are consistently available across different locations is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

   Solution: By utilizing Budibase, organizations can quickly develop a user-friendly interface tailored for order management. This interface simplifies the process of tracking orders, updating statuses, and managing customer interactions. YugabyteDB serves as the powerful backend database, ensuring that order details are consistently stored and available across distributed systems.

   The combination of Budibase and YugabyteDB is well-suited for small to medium-sized e-commerce platforms, providing a scalable, reliable, and easy-to-deploy solution for efficient management of order tracking.

3. Use Case: Survey and Feedback Applications with Budibase and YugabyteDB

   Challenge: Organizations need efficient tools to gather feedback or conduct surveys among employees, customers, or other stakeholders. The ability to collect, store, and analyze responses effectively is vital for informed decision-making and continuous improvement.

   Solution: Budibase offers a straightforward way to create custom survey forms and feedback applications, enabling quick deployment and ease of use. YugabyteDB complements this by providing a scalable and reliable backend for storing and managing the collected data. Together, they form a powerful solution for HR departments, marketing teams, or customer service initiatives, ensuring that feedback and survey data is securely stored, readily accessible, and easy to analyze for actionable insights.

Conclusion

This blog delves into the powerful combination of Budibase and YugabyteDB, and how you can leverage this solution to build a robust order management application. By leveraging Budibase’s intuitive low-code platform alongside YugabyteDB’s scalable and reliable distributed database, businesses can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and bring solutions to market more quickly.

Experience the power of YugabyteDB for free. Download today and get started immediately!