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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

I think Eirik Bakke deserves a shoutout on this thread. He's the creator of UltOrg (https://www.ultorg.com/) and has literally spent his career pursuing this question with a level of focus unlike anything I've ever seen.

UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel". The UI supports nested joins, aggregations, filtering, for both display and data update.

The result is essentially a general purpose app that can display just about any Microsoft Access UI that would been written in the 90s/2000s to provide editable views into relational data.

I'm not sure if it's a domain as universal as a grid of cells, but it's a very cool app and, as a friend of Eirik's, I wish him far more visibility than he's gotten for pushing longer on this particular niche than I think most people would have.

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This looks really neat and powerful. I think spreadsheets have a lot of deficiencies and that many users abuse them, but that's because there is no widely known alternative/extension. For example, I wanted to create a list of data sources in a particular area. It doesn't warrant any coding, this is just a simple document, but doing it in a spreadsheet is too clunky: I want tags, paragraphs of text, and, crucially, a vertical "heading-tags-link-description" structure. In the end, I wrote a Markdown doc, but now I can't sort or filter! It looks like UltOrg could deal with this, even though it's probably not one of the main usecases. I wish Eirik the best of luck with the project.

try org-mode

Here's the org-mode tables introduction:

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/tables.html

After that, google for filtering, sorting, etc. It's all possible.

Using Org mode [1] and for example EasyOrg [2] does pretty much that. You can use tags, links etc and filter and sort on text and tags. In the case of EasyOrg you would use the Agenda's List view and for the paragraphs to show up in the Agenda they have to start with TODO (or a custom state, i.e. '* DATA My link number one'). The document preview does not support filtering.

[1] https://orgmode.org [2] https://easyorgmode.com

> UltOrg is roughly "spreadsheets re-built atop the RDBMS datamodel".

That's how AirTable is described as well. And Google Tables. And Amazon Honeycode.

Airtable is not really that -- it does not do much/anything in the way of calculations or aggregations. I love it and it's great for creating very structured ways of managing data, but it can't do even very basic aggregations.

Not entirely true. Airtable has formula fields [1] and it can indeed summarize columns, and even slice and dice using crosstabs [2].

[1] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/203255215-For...

[2] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/115013249307-...

This in principle accurate, but the real story is less polished. If you look through the AirTable forums, you’ll see lots of cases where users are asking how to do a thing, and are told to abandon the highly limited scripting and to use JavaScript. This is what I characterize as a learning cliff.

Looking at UltOrg's website, it is not like Airtable. It's not a spreadsheet or spreadsheet interface (though I suppose it could be used that way); it is a much more automated, sophisticated UI for complex relational data. It looks very impressive.

Looks like what I've always wished for in sheets, more in line with what programmers would like to work with rather than AirTable and SmartSheets.

Wish there were some way to take it for a spin without having to "Request Access".

That looks really nice. Is it capable of doing DDL operations?

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