Startup QueryTree - Prepare And Visualize Reports With Ease

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QueryTree is a new app for exploring and visualizing content from your company’s databases. You can create queries or plot graphs without any coding knowledge, using a simple drag and drop interface. Daniel Thompson from QueryTree shares more details with us in the interview below.

Q: What is QueryTree and how does it work?

A: QueryTree is a tool for getting information out of databases. It’s a desktop application that runs on Windows and Mac and, when you run it, you can log in to a database and create a query by dragging and dropping icons and connecting them together. Once you have a query defined, you can save that query and re-run it anytime you like, or you can export the results into a spreadsheet.

For example, say you have a database at work containing employee information and you wanted to find all the people who work in a particular department with a salary over $50,000. You would open up the app, log into your database and drag the employee table into the main “worksheet” area of the app. Next you want to pick out the ones who work at a particular department, so you would drag the filter icon over and connect it to the employee table icon. When you do that, the filter tool will detect what columns the employee table has so you can choose “department” in the dropdown list and enter the department that you were interested in. Finally, to filter by salary you would drag another filter icon over and connect that to the results of the first filter, this time choosing “salary”, “greater than” and typing in 50000.

You can build up pretty much any query you can think of, just by dragging and dropping things around and choosing options from dropdown menus. There’s no code to write and everything is very visual.

Q: What was your inspiration for making it?

Over the years I’ve worked at various places where I was asked to develop management reports. Usually I was writing code to do something that someone had been doing manually using spreadsheets until now. I often found myself sitting down with the person who had been manually creating these reports and getting them to take me through the process that they had been following.

These reports often involved the same sorts of steps. They started with an extract from one system, they filtered out some data, grouped things up, calculated some totals, sorted rows into order, cross referenced rows from one table with entries in another, and then they plotted it all on a chart.

The problem was that, with a spreadsheet, it won’t remember how to do each of the steps next time round. Next month, when it’s time to create the same report, they’d have to go though the same steps all over again. And if you got distracted half way through, or did something wrong, it can be hard to figure out where you are or what’s happened, so you’d have to start over.

There are people who literally spend several days every month preparing the same set of reports over and over again. If only there was some way to describe a series of filters, groups, joins and sorts in such a way that you could just repeat them at the same time every month.

Q: What are main benefits of using it?

A: The main benefit is that you can automate the process (or most of the process) of producing reports, without having to learn to write code.

Q: Do you have any new features in the pipeline? What are your plans?

A: The main things are better support for charting, and support for more types of database.

You can plot bar chars and line charts in QueryTree at the moment, but we like to add pie charts, scatter plots and area charts.

When it comes to working with databases, at the moment QueryTree works with MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. But we’re looking to add support for PostgreSQL and maybe even SQLite too.

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