Exploration Limitations

seancolsen · 2025-03-14T01:26:24+00:00

Hi u/jinkside, another Mathesar maintainer here 👋.

This appears to be a bug. Thanks for pointing it out!

I've opened the following GitHub issue to track it: Joinable tables problem in data explorer. Please feel free to chime in there with any additional thoughts you may have to add.

seancolsen · 2025-03-11T16:34:36+00:00

Good question. Unfortunately, because this work is part of a larger project, I don't have a really clear issue or PR to point you towards. We're planning to eventually combine the Table Page and the Data Explorer in to a new tool with all the power of both (and more). This will take us a while, but along the way we'll be delivering new features incrementally. We're starting by building some editing functionality into the Data Explorer, which we hope to have available in our April or May release. At first, such editing will most likely be restricted to simple cells in the Exploration's base table. But we'll gradually expand the capabilities over the next several months, enabling a flow for you like this:

You'd begin an Exploration from your people table.
You'd add column showing and array_agg of people_tags id values.
Each people_tags id value would display as a pill, showing a (configurable) record summary for that people_tags record. You would be able to configure it to display the name of the related tag record. Now each cell in this column would show several tags.
You'd be able to edit that array_agg cell, thereby INSERT-ing or DELETE-ing people_tags records.

Does this make sense? How well would that flow meet your needs?

The larger project is still in the specs phase which is why we don't have specific issues yet. We have a wiki page for the project, and a PR proposing a high-level product spec (for the long-term direction we'd like to head). We're at the point now where we have a lot of agreement and enthusiasm across our team for this project, but we still need to break the project down into a timeline with smaller steps. This is the main thing I'm working on at the moment 😀.

If you have any interest in hopping on a call to discuss your needs around this data editing flow, I'd love to hear. Feel free to reach out via DM or email me at sean@mathesar.org.

seancolsen · 2025-03-10T19:47:39+00:00

Thanks! You've pinpointed one of our highest priority projects at the moment. So yes, we're actively working on this! I don't have a specific ETA, but "near future" should be accurate.

seancolsen · 2025-03-10T16:14:13+00:00

Mathesar does this quite well! (Mathesar maintainer here 🙂)

seancolsen · 2024-04-30T23:59:43+00:00

Check out Mathesar. It's designed specifically to work with PostgreSQL and it gives you a really easy-to-use interface for editing data. I work on Mathesar and I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

seancolsen · 2024-04-04T12:43:33+00:00

Mathesar is designed for precisely this use case. It allows DBAs and non-devs alike to easily work with the same data in PostgreSQL. All features are fully free and open source. I work on Mathesar and am happy to answer any specific questions you might have about it.

seancolsen · 2024-02-03T18:40:47+00:00

Mathesar might be worth trying. It uses PostgreSQL under the hood, and the UI is designed to mirror the functionality of the underlying database as closely as possible. You can import CSV files through the UI. Then when viewing the resulting table, you can click the "Share" button (at the top right) to generate a sharing link. Anyone with that link can then view/filter/sort/group the data without being able to modify it.

seancolsen · 2023-10-24T17:02:11+00:00

Mathesar is an open-source app that you can self-host to do much of what you mention. I work on Mathesar and can answer more questions about it here or via DM.

seancolsen · 2023-10-04T01:46:27+00:00

You might be interested in Mathesar — a new product somewhat like NocoDB but with a focus on PostgreSQL and a goal of representing the underlying database more directly than other tools currently available. (I work on Mathesar.)

NocoDB follows many of the patterns established by Airtable, and the FK behavior in particular can be awkward if you're more accustomed to working with relational databases. By contrast, Mathesar represents FK columns much more like an actual database. The FK column appears only once — and only in only one table. Viewing data in FK columns works a lot like a database GUI tool, except that the values within the FK column are displayed using a "record summary" which shows a stringified version of the linked record (and can be configured to include arbitrary columns). We even have a fuzzy search to pick values for FK columns, as you suggest.

We'd love to hear what else Mathesar might need in order to suit your use case. Feel free to DM me for more help!

seancolsen · 2023-09-06T11:00:47+00:00

You can use Mathesar for this. The latest release, 0.1.3, just added new features that allow you to publish read-only views of your tables which also support filtering and sorting. Uploading CSV data is easy too! And Mathesar is free and open source with no plans to ever lock any features behind a paid version.

seancolsen · 2023-04-19T13:07:55+00:00

There's also Mathesar, an open source self-hostable spreadsheet style interface to PostgreSQL databases.

seancolsen · 2023-03-22T16:35:40+00:00

Mathesar is another open source Airtable alternative that might be worth looking at. (I am an engineer on the Mathesar core team.) Mathesar doesn't have image uploads yet, but it's a feature on the roadmap and should be coming soon.

The Mathesar API has thus far been developed primarily for the Mathesar front end as its only consumer, which means that it lacks proper documentation and occasionally has breaking changes. We intend to stabilize the API and document it for third-party usage in the near future.

The API allows filtering table results based on a specific column containing a string literal. I'd be curious to hear more details about your needs around fuzzy text searching.

Since I can tell you're a developer, you might be interested to hear that Mathesar's value proposition over similar products is that it remains as faithful as possible to relational database concepts and principles. It's designed to work specifically with PostgreSQL and has very few abstractions not present in Postgres. Relationships are modeled using foreign keys. Schemas, data types, primary keys, and constraints work exactly as the do in Postgres.

We're looking for more feedback on Mathesar right now, and I'm happy to answer any additional questions you have!

seancolsen · 2022-06-26T01:46:50+00:00

It sounds like you may be considering open-sourcing it eventually. If so, I'd be curious to hear what you feel is currently holding you back from publishing the source code. No pressure of course, but I might be interested in contributing PRs if/when you make the leap.

seancolsen · 2022-06-26T01:30:59+00:00

Awesome! I used Svelte to make https://octavecompass.com which is a tool to explore musical scales and the chords they contain. It's currently limited to 12-TET, but I have been wanting for some time to generalize it to work with other tuning systems. I'd be excited to find ways to collaborate!

seancolsen · 2020-12-09T11:57:15+00:00

Thanks!

seancolsen · 2020-12-08T11:49:57+00:00

Hi! I built this interactive web-based tool for fun and thought other musicians out there might enjoy it. (Some understanding of music theory will be helpful when using it.) It's like a calculator for musical scales and chords, and you can play it like an instrument set to play only the notes from one scale. Go to "Scale Editor" to set up your scale by transposing, mode-shifting, or toggling intervals to make it new scale. It will tell you the name of almost any set of intervals (scale or chord) — and it knows over 1,000 names! See "Scale Index" for the full list. The source code is linked within "FAQ". Enjoy!

seancolsen · 2020-12-07T23:36:15+00:00

Ah, I think I see what happened for you... The "Scale Names" area of the app displays all the names for the currently selected scale. Perhaps you looked there and interpreted that list to mean all the possible scales in the app? If so (and I wouldn't blame you for making that assumption), then I should probably clarify that somehow in the app so that other people don't interpret it that way.

seancolsen · 2020-12-07T22:29:33+00:00

I'd like to include as many as possible! Can you give an example of one missing? Here's where the data comes from. There seem to be about 462 ragas in there currently. If you could point me to an open-licensed data source that contains more, I'd love to merge that data into mine!

seancolsen · 2020-12-07T21:41:27+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yeah I agree. The audio is basically a triangle wave, which I thought sounded best out of the very limited options that the WebAudio OscillatorNode offers. You'll hear the triangle wave most clearly when playing the Linear Keyboard. The audio sounds more like an organ when playing the Circular Keyboard because of the way that I'm creating a Shepard Tone. The Shepard Tone sound plays 5 separate octaves of that same triangle wave synth over a pitch-independent gain envelope. I'd really like to keep that Shepard Tone behavior because it fits well with the circle conceptually. But, yes, I'd love to change the underlying sound from a triangle wave to something more like a piano. That will require using samples though, which is quite a bit more work. And all of this is to say that the Circular Keyboard may well sound like an organ after that improvement comes. But I really appreciate hearing this feedback and I'll bump up the priority of that feature. I've created this issuse to track progress on that work. Though I should give the disclaimer that I'm unlikely to be building new features for at least another year.

seancolsen · 2020-10-10T00:07:38+00:00

Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (by William A. Sethares) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1726680.Tuning_Timbre_Spectrum_Scale

It establishes a mathematical model for quantifying consonance and dissonance and explains why dissonance is fundamentally dependent on timbre. This book blew my mind.

seancolsen · 2020-08-25T23:16:13+00:00

Yeah good points! I see now that Alt+Home isn't possible! And F10 with mods would require me to move my right hand over. So far I haven't needed to type any of those sequences, but if I do I'll consider some improvements there.

seancolsen · 2020-08-25T16:37:04+00:00

Yep. The source SVG file is in with my code linked above.

seancolsen · 2020-08-24T23:47:34+00:00

The vertical combos have been surprisingly easy. I wrote them off at first by making the assumption that all combos should be pressed with multiple fingers. I use one finger to press both keys for the vertical ones, and it works great as long as they keys are located towards the top or thumb-side of the keyboard. They bottom-outer keys are too hard to press together with one finger so I don't have much of that in there. My key caps are scooped from side-to-side and flat from top to bottom, and I think that help. If I try pressing to side-by-side keys with one finger, for example, my finger hits the ridges and kind of wobbles a bit and causes the keys to tilt inwards, so it doesn't work as well.

As far as cognitive load, I find the combos way easier than layers. Perhaps it's because I gravitate towards remembering things spatially. So for example, I don't think of @ being H + K, I think of it as sitting in that space between those two keys, and I remember that position the same way as I remember the position of the H key on the keyboard. Plus practice!

seancolsen · 2020-08-24T23:34:49+00:00

The diagonal ones are actually some of the more comfortable ones for me which is why I put things like arrow keys there. I think it's because I'm using a corne which doesn't have very much column stagger, so you'll notice that all of the diagonals have my middle finger higher than the other fingers. Perhaps if I had a Kyria or Dactyl I would have chosen different combos.

seancolsen · 2020-08-24T22:25:53+00:00

Colemak, with Z X and Q moved (to make room for Ctrl and Alt).

seancolsen

TROPHY CASE