Question 1

How do Airtable field types map into MySQL?

Accepted Answer

Text, email, URL, phone, single select, formulas and rollups become LONGTEXT. Checkbox becomes BOOLEAN. Number, currency, percent, rating and duration become numeric types, with anything unconstrained landing as DECIMAL(65,30). Dates and datetimes become DATE or DATETIME. Multi selects, links, collaborators, lookups and attachments become native JSON, with attachments reduced to URLs and collaborators to email addresses.

Question 2

Can I query inside those JSON columns?

Accepted Answer

Yes, using MySQL's JSON functions, because these are real JSON columns rather than text that happens to contain JSON. That is worth knowing if you have used destinations where nested structure gets flattened to strings on the way in and has to be parsed again downstream.

Question 3

Which column should I join Airtable rows on?

Accepted Answer

On the Airtable record ID, which arrives as its own column and is the only genuinely stable key, since a primary field can be edited by anyone with base access. One caveat specific to MySQL: string identities are indexed on a 256 character unique prefix, so uniqueness is enforced over that prefix rather than the whole value.

Question 4

Does the reader resume between runs?

Accepted Answer

No. Every ETL run paginates the table or view in full, because the bulk reader has no modified time cursor to work from. Airtable bases are usually small enough that this does not matter, but it is worth knowing before you point it at a base holding hundreds of thousands of records.

Question 5

What does connecting Airtable involve?

Accepted Answer

OAuth. Authorize the bases and tables you want, and make sure the authorizing Airtable user can actually see them, because Polytomic inherits exactly that access. A table missing from the picker is nearly always a permissions problem on the Airtable side rather than anything to do with the sync.

Sync Airtable to MySQL

Sync Airtable to MySQL with Polytomic

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Record ID retained

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Connect MySQL in Polytomic

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