One of my former labmates translated SQL92 into a GUI and recorded a 15-minute demo: https://twitter.com/eirikbakke/status/1193201350693265412 "The goal of all of this eventually is to have a system that I can replace a lot of these old-fashioned manually-made Microsoft Access applications and all the different views, forms, reports, tables, and so on that you see in those."

Ultorg is a wonderful little product. As a long time user of Filemaker Pro which is one of the longest-running and best entry-level databases on the market, i can numerous advantages for people who are exploring data and want to stay inside the spreadsheet paradigm. Where Filemaker has some advantages is their wonderful form design system, which has many graphical aids, and makes it easy to create very nice looking forms with lots of input validation. But for freeform queries Ultorg kicks FMPro's butt, and i can see a very lively market for that kind of product. There is a lot of data analysis that needs to be done, and the automatic report generation tools is fantastic.

When I was at Uni I used to socialise with a medical doctor that was working on his MD. He was doing clinical research and curating a data set using Microsoft Access. It’s interesting to see how non-programmers look at this kind of problem. He said something like “Building databases is fun, and productive… until you put too much in and it’s all tangled up … and you can’t remember how you put it together…”

People vastly underestimate how clever and refined Filemaker is in 2019. They have a graphical schema editor that is super clever; with special pagination preview dotted-lines so you can make it print nice for multi-page schemas. They use a node and wire metaphor in what they call the relationship editor, which is the part that creates the implied joins. Some years back Filemaker ditched their insides, and replaced ti with MySQL guts. So today, Filemaker is actually just a GUI for MySQL. As Filemaker evolved, they have steadily increased the price of the product. Their only major flaw is their scripting language is really clumsy and archaic.