Reltron: a GUI for exploring relational databases | Hacker News Reader

Reltron: a GUI for exploring relational databases

kevinlynagh.com

70 pointsrtsao8 comments

I really enjoyed this and would have been great to have something like this recently. Just the other day a coworker was writing some code on top of a database I had designed. He and I were discussing some of the result sets of a couple more complex queries that he needed to operate on. Given that there were a few many-to-many joins represented by relation tables in the section of the database that we were discussing, it was difficult for us to quickly iterate on a solution even while I had the SQL command line up and was querying tables as we talked.

While I am a fast SQL writer, having to munge and navigate the multiple relation tables during our fast-paced discussion was a little unwieldy. A tool like this to quickly jump between joins and look at the result sets while in the midst of a technical discussion as it evolves would have been perfect.

Very nice. Great example of what a difference it makes when you can play around with something and get immediate feedback, instead of having to plan ahead, look up commands, and imagine abstract things you can't see.

Maybe I missed something, but it seems like you still need to click around and look up commands in a list and figure out which to pick before clicking.

The SQL commands it would take to do what he did in a few seconds would I think have taken a decent coder half an hour. But even that underestimates the usefulness of this kind of GUI, because with the GUI you wouldn't have to know what you're trying to do in advance, whereas with code you do.

The coding space is big, permitting lots of invalid state -- most of the programs you could write are not just wrong but gibberish. Using a GUI like this reduces the problem space enormously; the comparison feels akin to the one between grabbing a live fish and connecting Lego blocks.

It's useful, but one still basically needs to plan ahead, look up commands, and imagine things.

It would be more useful if it weren't an OSX-only closed source demo.

I agree about its availability.

I think it's far more useful than you seem to, though. Reducing the problem space is huge. It's why macro programming (ala Lisp) is so dangerous. It's why I left Haskell for Python, and why I often wish I was using Idris[1], which pretty much reads your mind and writes what you meant. It's true of coding generally, but SQL programming especially, that there's a conceptually obvious, small space of reasonable programs, but because we're writing in text, we're free to roam over an enormous superspace of (occasionally) wrong or (usually) meaningless programs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtKD7ml0NU

I don't really have an OSX computer to use it on, so it's not that useful to me. I could probably make the same or better in a few hours.

Not sure exactly what you mean by wrong or meaningless programs. (edit3) I'm not sure it's possible to write a meaningless SQL statement.

Edit: it seems like the authors don't see it as that useful. I think the page said they are still looking for use-cases, or something. Have you contacted them?

Edit2 (fta): "However, as of Jan 2019 we’re tabling the project until we have a concrete, motivating use case to inform further development."

Great job guys, I see reltron getting better every time i see it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com