Ultorg lets you query and edit relational databases without writing SQL
Ultorg: The User Interface for Relational Databases
Ultorg is a spreadsheet-like desktop interface for relational databases that generates SQL behind the scenes. It connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, DuckDB, Excel, Google Sheets, and CSV files, and visualizes joins and one-to-many relationships in a single view. Users can filter, compute, and edit data across tables without custom CRUD apps, with changes reviewed before committing. A 14-day free trial is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
The way it can visualize multiple joins feels canonical in the sense that now, when I run complicated SQL queries, that's the format I use to imagine the results.
- kragen
Eirik Bakke's Ultorg (SIEUFERD) is amazing and inspirational research, and I'm glad to see that it's finally available to the public after 17 years. It's one of those things that really makes you sit up and take notice of how much better our everyday software could have been.
However, I wouldn't be willing to try it under proprietary-software terms. Last week, I was thinking about eliciting open-source software with the Ultorg look and feel from an LLM, thus replicating Bakke's HCI research and enabling other HCI researchers to build on it, which won't be possible under a proprietary license.
My notes on Ultorg may be of interest; you can
git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git
and read sieuferd.md (5200 words).
The introduction:
> Eirik Bakke’s [SIEUFERD][0] (or, as he sometimes spells it, SIUEFERD) is a really interesting and promising generic database frontend, a “schema-independent database UI”. The elevator pitch is “a new kind
of graphical query interface [with] the power of SQL but the
ease-of-use of a spreadsheet”. (Unfortunately, he forgot to implement
the DDL part of SQL, just doing the DML part.)
I can highly recommend Bakke's 5-minute talk on it from 10 years ago at https://vimeo.com/173726371.
- Skeime
I think the novel thing here, that I have not yet seen in any other database app, is the realization that normal SQL joins are not quite what you want in most cases.
Often, you are interested in nested results. "Give me all my customers with a list of their orders." However, when you do this with a join, you get a list of the orders with a copy of the customer information attached to each, instead. In Ultorg, you actually get the customer with a list of their orders nested in their row as a sub-table, but with that sub-table's headers cleverly floated to the top, so they're not repeated for each customer.
As a second trick, Ultorg manages to remember the relations, so the data is editable in the nested tables. (There are some limitations to this, I believe.)
I used the trial version of Ultorg at the beginning of the year (the example in the 2.1.4 changelog is based on my use case), and it was tons of fun to use. Ultorg is great. I wish I had discovered it right at the start of that small project.
Unfortunately, I do not have a regular use case for this, and for personal use and occasional unpaid hobby projects, Ultorg's license is not a good fit. So I check the website from time to time whether there's been a change to it; no luck so far.
I am no business expert, and I do not know how well Eirik is doing with the current model. However, I do have the impression that he underestimates how many people would have a use case in their private life for it, but not at $35/month. I t […]
- akshayrajeshwar
Previously used it and it's AMAZING given you have data stored with good practices, e.g. with unique IDs that are consistent among many databases/sheets. I found it's easier to begin with Ultorg's usecase in mind than to migrate existing files to fit its use.
And I do agree with the criticisms mentioned in the thread. Ultorg is solving a lot of problems of data organisation and context awareness, so starting a business with a perpetual license would be awesome.
Guess I just don't wanna lose access to the tool once I have all the tailored files and fail to pay again.
Should mention that Eirik is a joy talk to and will quite possibly accommodate you. All the best to him.
- NetMageSCW
A small desktop app that is a subscription rubs me the wrong way.
- maxloh
Someone just posted an open-source alternative earlier today. Its UI looks better too.