I’m on the Mathesar core team and happy to answer any questions about the product.

One thing that’s worth highlighting is that Mathesar is open source!

Jerod, I appreciate your skepticism in considering the risk of connecting a powerful tool like this to a production app with business logic outside the database. To mitigate some of those risks, we do have a permissions system that allows admins to grant users read-only or “data entry only” access to the DB, while still allowing those users to save and update queries for viewing data.

Our vision for Mathesar extends beyond these sort of business intelligence use cases too – we’re also aiming to make Mathesar well-suited for stand-alone use cases where, instead of using Google Sheets or Airtable, you can self-host a product that follows relational database principles and enables collaboration with users of all skill levels.

I don’t think that I would turn this loose on databases that I currently have (simply because how they were originally designed) but with a new database that is designed from scratch to use this kind of tool, I’d be all for that. This would keep you fat from being locked into some proprietary format that you couldn’t easily move later.