PM at Retool here. Generally speaking, as scalable as any other piece of software. Specifically:
- Retool is datastore/backend-agnostic, so from a backend/data perspective it will be as scalable as whatever backend you’re using to process/store those orders. You can connect Retool to make requests to your own API, to directly query a database, etc.
- From a frontend perspective, you can choose to deploy Retool using Retool’s Cloud, or self-host Retool on your own private cloud. The former is quite scalable, but if you wanted full control over scalability you’d likely opt to self-host. If you’re self-hosting you have all of the “typical” scaling techniques available to you: you can e.g. run Retool on Kubernetes, and vertically or horizontally scale however you need.
(PM at Retool) For self-hosted deployments, you can point an existing Postgres DB (v14.3 or later) to Retool Database - though it’s more specifically designed to quickly evolve a new database. For cloud customers, we currently don’t support pointing your own database but it’s something we’re thinking about!
No custom extensions - we wanted to make it a lightweight and effective layer on top of Postgres. So it’s just a vanilla Postgres database under the hood. The UI gives you access to a lot of the power of Postgres, and for anything that you can’t do via the UI you can use the connection string directly: e.g. create triggers, create compound unique keys, etc.
- Retool is datastore/backend-agnostic, so from a backend/data perspective it will be as scalable as whatever backend you’re using to process/store those orders. You can connect Retool to make requests to your own API, to directly query a database, etc.
- From a frontend perspective, you can choose to deploy Retool using Retool’s Cloud, or self-host Retool on your own private cloud. The former is quite scalable, but if you wanted full control over scalability you’d likely opt to self-host. If you’re self-hosting you have all of the “typical” scaling techniques available to you: you can e.g. run Retool on Kubernetes, and vertically or horizontally scale however you need.
For more on scaling self-hosted deployments, see: https://docs.retool.com/docs/horizontally-scaling-retool