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Comment by arjonagelhout | Hacker News Reader

Here’s some more information on Ultorg:

> Ultorg creates general-purpose software that helps organizations manage their data. Based on a new method for interactive data visualization, our product combines ease-of-use with expressive power to allow end-users to query, display, and edit relational data, without resorting to custom programming. This fills a long-standing gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made database applications. [0]

I find it inspiring that it has such readable and space-efficient interface, compared to current trends in many web apps.

[0] https://ultorg.com

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I wonder how much the data in the demo helps sell the readability and space-efficiency. Like anything looks tidy if there's 3-4 rows of data being joined. But that sort of well behaved small-scale hello world database isn't difficult to work with in any tool.

How does it handle if the table I join pulls in a thousand matching rows for each key?

> I wonder how much the data in the demo helps sell the readability and space-efficiency.

This is a very good question.. In the section of the video on automatic form layout it is strongly implied that the auto-layout is driven by semantic inference of the column names. I see this easily breaking -- anyone who's ever inherited a production database knows that column names are often cryptic or context specific.

Also makes me wonder how well that system handles databases with non-English identifiers?

Column names are used primarily to inform the detection of "heading" fields, i.e. fields that should be given a larger font in the form layout, or fields that should be shown by default when adding a join to another table. The other heuristics are based on things such as data type, average length of strings, and average join cardinalities.

(Coincidentally, the system is named after a cryptic, context-specific column name in a real dataset the author once worked on.)

There's a dataset like that in the demo at https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/553439658 . Ultorg handles larger datasets through a number of strategies: (1) automatic LIMIT clauses with an infinite scroll like mechanism, and with various rules to deal with the nested data structure, (2) a multi-threaded UI that keeps the visual query representation responsive even during long-running queries, (3) automatic cancellation of ongoing queries if the user makes a change, e.g. to add a filter, (4) "frozen" headers and values that makes the data make visual sense even as you scroll down multiple pages, (5) a separate "single-column" form layout type that works well when you have a few grouping fields followed by a long subtable, and a few others.

(Author of Ultorg here.)

> I find it inspiring that it has such readable and space-efficient interface, compared to current trends in many web apps.

Agree.

> our product combines ease-of-use with expressive power to allow end-users to query, display, and edit relational data, without resorting to custom programming. This fills a long-standing gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made database applications.

How does it compare to Access or LibreOffice Base? That's always been the next step once the spreadsheet proves inadequate.

Microsoft Access was an attempt to do the same: provide a user interface to a relational database. But it was never as easy to use as Excel, or the other office applications. There are still quite a few MS Access files around in government and legacy corporate datasets, and Ultorg can connect to them.

Back when Ultorg was an academic project, we did a controlled user study comparing Ultorg's visual query interface (then called SIEUFERD) to Microsoft Access' query builder. Using the System Usability Scale, Ultorg's usability was in the 52th percentile (better than 52% of business software), while Microsoft Access was 6th(!) percentile (better than 6% of business software, i.e. worse than 94% of business software). (Source: https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/research/sieuferd_sigmod... )

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