Data Native - An Accessible & Touch-Guided iPad App for MySQL Database Browsing
Data Native is an iPad App that enables database exploration without writing a single line of code. Scanning through large data sets becomes as simple as swiping, dragging, and dropping.
Overview
Data Native plugs right into an existing database. Our current implementation supports 3 different exploratory gestures which can be used applied repeatedly to produce new data sets. Each gesture manipulates data at table-level granularity. The gestures and their associated query implementations are shown below, as applied to a sample data table.
1. Sort - By swiping right or left on a column header, the user may sort the data set (i.e. add an “order by” qualifier) by ascending or descending order of data in the chosen column. This will append an ORDER BY clause to the current query.
2. Filter – By dragging and dropping a data block from the data set to a column header, the user may filter the data according to a specific value. This is equivalent to "SELECT * FROM table WHERE column=value".
3. Aggregate – By dragging and dropping a column header to the main table header, the user can initiate an aggregation. This will group together rows that have the same value for this column. After selecting the grouping column, the user chooses how to combine the other columns in the row by dragging a second column to a function value. The choices are MAX, MIN, COUNT, or SUM. This is equivalent to "SELECT column1, FUNC(column2) GROUP BY column1".
Basic Setup
A desktop server application is necessary for secure database access. It can be downloaded here.
To run the app, download the server application, enter your database configuration, then start the server. You can then start the iPad app and connect it to the server. You will can then use GestureDB with all of the databases accessible with your MySQL credentials.
Please ensure that the MySQL account you use has access to create temporary views on the database, otherwise the gestures will not work.
Server Setup
Mac OS X
Download and unzip the zip file, then run "gesturedb-sever.app". You should just see a little 'G' icon appear on the utilities toolbar at the top right corner of the screen. If you click it, you will see a dropdown menu. Click "Settings" to configure your MySQL database information and server port number. Once you've saved this information, click from the "Start Server". You will then be able to access your server from your iPad, so long as your iPad can connect to your server's IP at the port specified.
This works best if your iPad is on the same LAN as your server, but sometimes this cannot be the case for public networks (e.g. school wifi). To get around this issue, I recommend looking into reverse SSH tunneling. You can make your server publically accessible by tunneling through a cloud service or VPN (for example, on an AWS EC2 instance) that has a public IP address.