For any such tool, two questions are of primary importance:
- How connections between multiple tables are represented and managed
- How derived data is described (queries, workflows etc.)
Typically such tools are aimed at simplifying data connections but normally they end up with some kind of join-like approach which requires high expertise and is error prone. So users have to deal with something they wanted to get rid of when they buy the tool. Plato is not an exception: "No SQL needed". Yet, I could not find any information on how exactly it manages connections between tables and how the unified "virtual table" is defined.
The second question is about how we can derive new data from existing data. Ideally, users would like to have something very similar to Excel because spreadsheets are indeed extremely intuitive: we define new cells as functions of other cells (which in turn might be functions of other cells). In Plato I found "virtual columns" which should be rather useful. This is somewhat similar to the column-oriented approach implemented in Prosto [0]. Yet, what is really non-trivial is how to define (derived) columns by combining data from multiple tables.
In general, the tool looks very promising and I hope that additional features and additional information will make it really popular.
[0] https://github.com/asavinov/prosto Prosto is a data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby
Pkey/Fkey joins are supported in Plato by "expanding" foreign keys. You can log in, connect our sample DB, and play around with how it works. It's pretty easy. We're soon adding support for generic joins as well.
And, yes! We take a more structured, column-oriented approach than Excel. Much like Airtable. Though we are introducing an Excel-like formula language for defining derived values. It will compile to SQL on the backend, but not expose that to the user.
- How connections between multiple tables are represented and managed
- How derived data is described (queries, workflows etc.)
Typically such tools are aimed at simplifying data connections but normally they end up with some kind of join-like approach which requires high expertise and is error prone. So users have to deal with something they wanted to get rid of when they buy the tool. Plato is not an exception: "No SQL needed". Yet, I could not find any information on how exactly it manages connections between tables and how the unified "virtual table" is defined.
The second question is about how we can derive new data from existing data. Ideally, users would like to have something very similar to Excel because spreadsheets are indeed extremely intuitive: we define new cells as functions of other cells (which in turn might be functions of other cells). In Plato I found "virtual columns" which should be rather useful. This is somewhat similar to the column-oriented approach implemented in Prosto [0]. Yet, what is really non-trivial is how to define (derived) columns by combining data from multiple tables.
In general, the tool looks very promising and I hope that additional features and additional information will make it really popular.
[0] https://github.com/asavinov/prosto Prosto is a data processing toolkit radically changing how data is processed by heavily relying on functions and operations with functions - an alternative to map-reduce and join-groupby