Eve&#x27;s already been mentioned here, and Chris&#x27; lecture at Cal was really interesting from a UX perspective. I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve seen it but if not, go watch it.<p>The spreadsheet model is fairly intuitive for the end-user. He and Rich Hickey both are pretty convinced that a Datalog-esque query engine is the way to go. 20 years ago, Lotus&#x27; Improv&#x27;s model (where you separated the data manipulation from the data type constraints) was way ahead of its time and guaranteed so much more internal&#x2F;referential integrity than 1-2-3. Modern-day Quantrix is probably the closest you&#x27;ll get to it, used pretty heavily in niche finance.<p>MSR puts out some interesting work on the PLT behind alternate spreadsheet grammars[1] which are quite interesting too. Other than the obvious issues (ETL[2], ACLs&#x2F;RBAC, presentation&#x2F;extensibility) MSR has put out quite a few interesting papers out there. This is a very interesting problem domain to say the least. I&#x27;ve  developed up-to-the-Pareto-point for this in the past for clients and if you get it right, it&#x27;s a license to print money.<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;um&#x2F;people&#x2F;sumitg&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;pldi11-table-synthesis.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;um&#x2F;people&#x2F;sumitg&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;pl...</a> 
[2][both conventional a la SSIS and Informatica, as well as a Pipes-esque query; a premium feature you could easily charge into-the-Oracle-rates would be a Pipes-esque service with an SLA. I&#x27;ve been in enterprise consulting long enough to know that whether you&#x27;re Ingersoll Rand, Haas, an REIT or Cravath, sanitized, guaranteed data is worth a lot, integration is worth even more.