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.
> 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.)
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.
It looks like a polished thing that from a UX perspective sits between a spreadsheet and PowerBI
It let's any user with DB access build reports pretty close to how you'd edit a spreadsheet and without having to build pipelines in PowerBI and setup ingestion etc, etc.
The closest thing I've seen here is the old Tableu Desktop, but this one is more focused on tables than figures.
Please approach this the other way around: try both and share your preferences here.
These seem to be entirely different tools. Ultorg is a generic relational gui (like Bento, Access and so on), dbeaver is a database admin tool centered around writing SQL and managing tables.
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 think this could also help attract new commercial users. After all, it's much easier to convince your boss of purchasing a software if you have already built expertise by using it personally.
It is the language's fault, because SQL offers no good way to get nested results. If you want to avoid the duplication, you can do multiple queries, but then you essentially have to do the join on the receiving end, which kind of defeats the purpose of having joins in SQL.
Alternatively, you might use functions to aggregate in the query, but they're not standard, as far I know, which means that interfaces in programming languages often do not support them. The best bet might be aggregating into JSON, but this removes quite a bit of the type information that values in SQL usually carry. (Also, the aggregation functions are generally less pleasant to write than standard joins.)
Yeah, ARRAY_AGG being an optional part of the standard is annoying, and in general the array handling functions have been very non-standardized and messy - it's getting better though!
No, that's still the SQL languages' fault because you cannot return multiple tables in a single query.
Half the reason why ORMs have trouble has to do with the fact that you need to fetch has many relations via a second select.
Beyond that, it's the GPPL languages' fault that it doesn't support object or class fragments which are needed to support queries that return a subset of an object.
If people bothered fixing these two issues, then ORMs would be great.
It's a "new database" (actually a layer on top of Postgres). It has a more ergonomic query language, and it returns results as nested structures rather than rows. So "give me all my customers with a list of their orders" returns what you want.
Unfortunately, the startup that was developing Gel got acqui-hired, and Gel's future is unclear.
This is the first link in this thread that points to something innovative, I think. Their UI screenshot does have nested results, for example. No commit to their open-source repository in 11 months is worrisome, though.
> for personal use and occasional unpaid hobby projects, Ultorg's license is not a good fit.
I had the same issue. I was enamored with the UI Ultorg presented for SQL. However once the pricing came out it felt.. harsh unless i was using a lot of SQL in my work, which i was not. If it was a Jetbrains style license i'd have one now, even though i rarely use DBs in this manner.
I've wanted something like this for a really long time. Unfortunately I'll never use this because there's no way I'm going to pay for it, let alone pay an ongoing subscription fee, but it looks pretty cool.
> From September 2026, Mathias Breistein has taken over as CEO, with a focus on new customer acquisition
Mathias, if you are here and listening, I'm interested but $35 / month is the wrong price point for this. $420 for year.
I can buy DataGrip for $261 for three years and it has a perpetual fallback license that would let me pay for the first year and then stop and just not get updates.
IMO, to start, you want your product to be so good and so reasonably priced that it's easy for someone to decide to give it a try. You are coming in with a uber premium price and I think that's going to severely hinder your customer acquisition efforts.
Also, I almost never get a license to a tool like this where I'm not entitled to keep using it if I stop paying for it. There is just too much incentive on the part of the vendor to just keep driving the price up to the breaking point. With a fallback license like JetBrains has, if they get unreasonable about price, I can just exit.
Finally, in the age of LLMs, if this gets popular and the price point is wrong, someone is going to do a good job of producing a competitor and make it open source or much less expensive. Make the official version a reasonable enough price that there is no reason to not support you to make it better.
Just my $0.02 but hope it helps at some level.
Finally, I looked at the website and there was no way to contact you to tell you this personally. So...might want to fix that. Small org, easy contact should be part of the perk.
NetMageSCW | 10 hours ago
aetherspawn | 9 hours ago
dymk | 7 hours ago
convict | 6 hours ago
aetherspawn | 4 hours ago
kragen | 9 hours ago
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
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.
aetherspawn | 9 hours ago
akshayrajeshwar | 9 hours ago
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.
refactor_master | 8 hours ago
maxloh | 8 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50427934
vim-guru | 7 hours ago
Skeime | 6 hours ago
dmos62 | 4 hours ago
endverbraucher | 8 hours ago
wodenokoto | 7 hours ago
patates | 8 hours ago
polskibus | 7 hours ago
wodenokoto | 7 hours ago
It looks like a polished thing that from a UX perspective sits between a spreadsheet and PowerBI
It let's any user with DB access build reports pretty close to how you'd edit a spreadsheet and without having to build pipelines in PowerBI and setup ingestion etc, etc.
The closest thing I've seen here is the old Tableu Desktop, but this one is more focused on tables than figures.
kragen | 6 hours ago
mapcars | 6 hours ago
Stitch4223 | 6 hours ago
These seem to be entirely different tools. Ultorg is a generic relational gui (like Bento, Access and so on), dbeaver is a database admin tool centered around writing SQL and managing tables.
Skeime | 6 hours ago
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 think this could also help attract new commercial users. After all, it's much easier to convince your boss of purchasing a software if you have already built expertise by using it personally.
UltraSane | 5 hours ago
ctippett | 4 hours ago
Skeime | 3 hours ago
Alternatively, you might use functions to aggregate in the query, but they're not standard, as far I know, which means that interfaces in programming languages often do not support them. The best bet might be aggregating into JSON, but this removes quite a bit of the type information that values in SQL usually carry. (Also, the aggregation functions are generally less pleasant to write than standard joins.)
efromvt | an hour ago
achr2 | 2 hours ago
imtringued | 46 minutes ago
Half the reason why ORMs have trouble has to do with the fact that you need to fetch has many relations via a second select.
Beyond that, it's the GPPL languages' fault that it doesn't support object or class fragments which are needed to support queries that return a subset of an object.
If people bothered fixing these two issues, then ORMs would be great.
Taikonerd | 49 minutes ago
It's a "new database" (actually a layer on top of Postgres). It has a more ergonomic query language, and it returns results as nested structures rather than rows. So "give me all my customers with a list of their orders" returns what you want.
Unfortunately, the startup that was developing Gel got acqui-hired, and Gel's future is unclear.
Skeime | 30 minutes ago
mamcx | 3 hours ago
cgio | 2 hours ago
unshavedyak | 43 minutes ago
I had the same issue. I was enamored with the UI Ultorg presented for SQL. However once the pricing came out it felt.. harsh unless i was using a lot of SQL in my work, which i was not. If it was a Jetbrains style license i'd have one now, even though i rarely use DBs in this manner.
BrenBarn | 5 hours ago
perbu | 4 hours ago
velcrovan | an hour ago
dethos | 58 minutes ago
edbaskerville | an hour ago
rsyring | 47 minutes ago
Mathias, if you are here and listening, I'm interested but $35 / month is the wrong price point for this. $420 for year.
I can buy DataGrip for $261 for three years and it has a perpetual fallback license that would let me pay for the first year and then stop and just not get updates.
IMO, to start, you want your product to be so good and so reasonably priced that it's easy for someone to decide to give it a try. You are coming in with a uber premium price and I think that's going to severely hinder your customer acquisition efforts.
Also, I almost never get a license to a tool like this where I'm not entitled to keep using it if I stop paying for it. There is just too much incentive on the part of the vendor to just keep driving the price up to the breaking point. With a fallback license like JetBrains has, if they get unreasonable about price, I can just exit.
Finally, in the age of LLMs, if this gets popular and the price point is wrong, someone is going to do a good job of producing a competitor and make it open source or much less expensive. Make the official version a reasonable enough price that there is no reason to not support you to make it better.
Just my $0.02 but hope it helps at some level.
Finally, I looked at the website and there was no way to contact you to tell you this personally. So...might want to fix that. Small org, easy contact should be part of the perk.