News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ultorg: A user interface for relational databases [video] by kallistisoft on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @08:48PM (#31255513)
> 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?

Re:Ultorg: A user interface for relational databases [video] by eirikbakke on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @10:46PM (#31256186)
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.)