Database Enhancement - Merging Linked Records
Tools: Airtable, n8n, Make/Integromat
The Problem: Nearly 75,000 records that had duplicates and linked records across 3 tabs. I needed to merge the duplicates while keeping the linked records intact.
Available solutions were able to merge duplicates but could not combine the linked records.
Nor could I find any Airtable scripts that could dedupe and maintain the linked records.
The Process
I start my process by identfying big issues that I don’t know the answers to.
In this case, how to combine linked records and return them via API when it ranges from 1-2000+ linked records.
To test this, I turned to the Airtable API docs to determine JSON structures and then built them out in Make.
Lessons Learned
This was a fun solve in building out the right JSON structures for the Airtable batch API calls, optimizing iterators and aggregators to deal with the limits of Airtable (10 records max in a batch API call), and also figuring out how to deduplicate thousands of records.
If I were to tackle this again, I would likely move everything into an SQL database and run SQL queries. This wasn’t a paid project so I was more interested in exploring the limitations of Make.com, n8n and Airtable.
But all in all, very happy I took the time to solve this problem as doing batch API calls within Airtable has come up time and time again for clients.
