Author here. Thanks everyone for using Poli. I am happy to answer any questions!
Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#22This looks fantastic! Since it runs as a self-hosted jar, is there any way to change the UI? Put it in a frame, style with CSS, call some JS for automation or report selection with parameters?
The UI is not configurable at this moment. You can embed the full screen view in an and then adjust URL parameters to select which report to load.
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#23why not use Superset?
ever try to setup superset?
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#24why not use Superset?
yeah I was hoping for more feedback on Superset and with Druid as well. They look great but there's very little buzz about them.
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#25> No ETLs
This seems to be listed as a feature, which I find confusing. Not everything lives in SQL databases. Some things you extract for example from external APIs.
Is this basically "this is out of scope for the project", or it's a feature because we've got ?
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#26why not use Superset?
ever try to setup superset?
Yeah I deployed it to Kubernetes the other day.
I got it up in a few hours, and the included docker (compose) files are helpful, but it was a frustrating experience for a couple of reasons:
* There is some legal issue with the Apache foundation that’s preventing them publishing to PyPi (details about this were lacking).
* As a result, the provided dockerfile uses a very outdated version.
* Installing any missing dependencies means essentially building your own dockerfile anyways: in my case, it was the bane of my life Snowflake DB dependencies...
* Maybe it’s just me, but figuring out how to go from single-container ephemeral deployment to backend celery workers, external DB for persistence and a redos instance for caching (the recommended production setup) was frustrating to no end
* There are hosted versions you can use.
That said, we’re still going ahead with Superset, because it’s an improvement over the costly, ugly and over-opinionated alternative that is Tableau...
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#27Quite impressive, bookmarked for later use. What is the story behind Poli?
Thanks. The project is built mainly to solve my own problem that I often receive requests from the business side that they wanna access the data in the production system (We use different RDMS and Elasticsearch) so they can generate some simple charts in Excel and display to the customers. The request is not difficult but we just don't have a system for that. Since then, I have been trying different BI solutions like Power BI, Kibana and some other open source tools. They are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough to me. That's why I build Poli. I want it to be more focusing on easy to use, having an open license and the developer can use SQL to build reports easily for the end users or embed the reports in their systems.
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#28Hackernews is so strange. The post some weeks ago with the title "Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use SQL reporting application built for SQL lovers" didn't get traction at all.
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#29It's a pity they use pie charts to show off their software. At least the don't show them in 3D. (And just to make it clear: there is no use case where pie charts are the best solution. At best they are an acceptable solution.)
What's wrong with pie charts? What would you suggest using when you want to see a percentage breakdown?
Re: Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
#30It's a pity they use pie charts to show off their software. At least the don't show them in 3D. (And just to make it clear: there is no use case where pie charts are the best solution. At best they are an acceptable solution.)
What's wrong with pie charts? What would you suggest using when you want to see a percentage breakdown?
Use bars showing percentage. This way you can compare the values to a scale on the side and to each other. You can't see a difference easily on a pie chart without annotation. With enough values, you likely can't tell 5% from 10%, and difference between a fragment on the left from a fragment on the right.
This is even worse in 3d pie chart which doesn't even preserve proportions in areas/angles, so splitting in 4 parts, bottom/top will be larger than left/right.