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Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

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Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#71

Post by j_s »

sixdimensional wrote: post #58
j_s wrote: post #22

Ask HN: Is there any open source BI tool that is always first on the list when the conversation finally gets to "Oh, you're on the Windows/Microsoft stack? Then you're probably going to wind up using _______"

I think part of the reason this happens is Java has wider support out of the box for most data sources via JDBC than Windows has with ODBC/ADO.NET. I mean, it's a close race, but most new open source databases have Java/JDBC drivers first and then ODBC second, for example. I think this may change a little with .NET being opened and cross platform, but it might take a while. Of course you can make Java/JDBC connection…

Thanks for taking the time to respond!

I'm not unstanding why you mentioned Java/JDBC, I'm not aware of any of the mentioned tools (redash,superset,blazer; turns out metabase uses Clojure) using Java. Only redash doesn't list SQL Server support. What am I missing?

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#72

Post by teej »

fudged71 wrote: post #70

For data visualization I recently switched from SQL+Excel to Tableau, and I'm never going back.

My qualms with Tableau is that they've moved excruciating slowly on MacOS support and that getting started from scratch seemed like a major development effort. We evaluated Tableau against Looker and are now very happy customers of the latter for a year+.

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#73

Post by salsakran »

xtracto wrote: post #36

I tried Redash some time ago while I was looking for a very simple "BI" like tool that our non-technical or low-technical colleagues could use (people in Client Satisfaction team). I settled for Metabase ( http://www.metabase.com/ , https://github.com/metabase/metabase ), mainly for the ease of use and installation (a simple java -jar metabase.jar does the trick). Redash was a close second (one advantage at that time…

I'm one of the Metabase team, and for what it's worth, we support read-only users now!

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#75

Post by davb »

arikfr wrote: post #19
davb wrote: post #2

Redash is fantastic. Things like scheduled queries just work, and the AMI is a great way to get up and running quickly. The docs are decent and the upgrade script works well. I also really appreciated the (optional) Login with Google feature and the ability to limit it to certain email domains (we use Google Apps, so it worked really well). We've been trialling it casually in our engineering and data science teams. H…

(Redash author here) I was really hoping to address this in the upcoming v1.0.0 release, but eventually didn't want to delay it as it was in the oven for too long anyway. It will probably be addressed in the release after. Beside the ability to delete a user have you experienced other rough edges in the recent releases? We strive to improve the stability and reduce the rough edges with every release, so really want t…

Hey thanks for replying.

We noticed a couple of UI irregularities (for example when editing charts the contents or axis labels would disappear). Unfortunately I don't have anything more specific for you right now. I did notice when deleting users it seems that they (and their dependent db objects) actually deleted from the database (rather than flagged as deleted) - for traceability it would be great if they weren't removed altogether.

Though to balance things, let me tell you what we loved about Redash. The user/group/source model is really nice - I appreciated being able to give only our admin group users access to a data source configured with our database master user credentials. The Google OAUTH functionality (and really clear documentation around this) and pre-rolled AMI were a huge plus, allowing me to get our team up and running really quickly. The same goes for the Lets Encrypt instructions (we all use certbot regularly but no-one had to dig through Redash's config files blind - the docs were spot on). The ability to fork queries - superb. Data export was also fantastic.

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#77

Post by Karunamon »

arikfr wrote: post #14

Hi! I'm the author of Redash :) Nice to see Redash at the top of HN. I'll be happy to answer any questions about Redash, open source and about my journey to make Redash a self sustainable project. For any questions that don't fit on HN, feel free to reach me at arik at redash.io.

I saw a mention on the front page about using custom scripts as data sources, but when I dig down into the docs about how to set those up, there's no mention of it.

Is there a blurb somewhere about how that data must be formatted and used?

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#78

Post by sixdimensional »

j_s wrote: post #71
sixdimensional wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the reason this happens is Java has wider support out of the box for most data sources via JDBC than Windows has with ODBC/ADO.NET. I mean, it's a close race, but most new open source databases have Java/JDBC drivers first and then ODBC second, for example. I think this may change a little with .NET being opened and cross platform, but it might take a while. Of course you can make Java/JDBC connection…

Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'm not unstanding why you mentioned Java/JDBC, I'm not aware of any of the mentioned tools (redash,superset,blazer; turns out metabase uses Clojure) using Java. Only redash doesn't list SQL Server support. What am I missing?

Well, I meant in the general context of database connectivity. The underlying database connectivity plumbing is almost always a JDBC or ODBC interface when you're talking a regular DBMS [1].

Historically, ODBC was not always as popular on Linux (being a Microsoft standard originally), although that has changed a lot by today. JDBC was usually more associated to open source/Linux BI/database tools (Java being open source in origin itself), which is why for a while, you could connect to more data sources with JDBC drivers/interfaces than ODBC. Writing a JDBC driver is also many times less complicated than writing an ODBC driver. The ODBC spec is old and complicated.. JDBC is still difficult but much less complicated.

Most programming languages can get to either a JDBC or ODBC driver via some mechanism, on pretty much any platform. So today I guess it's hard to say that it matters (ideally it shouldn't), I was just giving my personal take on the historical context that lead to the comment you made - "why doesn't this run in the Microsoft stack?".

All of the tools mentioned (redash, superset, blazer) are relying on the underlying interfaces in ODBC / JDBC for regular databases. If the system is running on Unix and accessing ODBC, it is almost guaranteed to be using UnixODBC to be doing so. Any tool like this (I don't know the internal-specifics of these tools) would probably have built a layer in to abstract away the low-level interface into some mechanism that hopefully makes the use of JDBC or ODBC (or any interface) irrelevant. That's a lot harder than it seems on the face of it. I used to work for a company that made a product that connected / federated data from "any" platform - which is partly what influences my opinion of how difficult it is to wrangle all these interfaces at lower-levels.

EDIT: I think the crux of what I'm saying is, the reason you don't have a tool that pops up when you ask that question is, because of OS platform differences, with Linux/open source usually being the first priority over Windows historically.

[1] Some DBMS provide native web services connectivity which obviates the need for JDBC/ODBC completely.. which is kind of nice.

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#79

Post by sixdimensional »

arikfr wrote: post #57
_joel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, essentially. An export to a file on a given time period would be fine, can deal with the format conversion etc myself. I'm thinking of sending arbitrary reports to management without the need for Jasper etc.

Exports to CSV or Excel are already available. In future releases we will add support for full reports with visualizations and everything. It's actually already possible with some scripting and our API, but I want to add it into the product itself.

Also, publish data set as a web service dataset, and now you're into the features offered by "data virtualization" software vendors / tools (things like Teiid or Denodo, for example).

Re: Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

#80

Post by xtracto »

salsakran wrote: post #73
xtracto wrote: post #36

I tried Redash some time ago while I was looking for a very simple "BI" like tool that our non-technical or low-technical colleagues could use (people in Client Satisfaction team). I settled for Metabase ( http://www.metabase.com/ , https://github.com/metabase/metabase ), mainly for the ease of use and installation (a simple java -jar metabase.jar does the trick). Redash was a close second (one advantage at that time…

I'm one of the Metabase team, and for what it's worth, we support read-only users now!

Kind of... I mean, we use it very heavily in my current company. And we are always looking forward for a new release.

What you cannot do right now (v0.22.0) is let some people see cards but not create "new questions". I know the current release being developed is tackling something akin to "published dashboards", so I am very happy.

Btw, great work! you cannot imagine how happy Metabase made both our Devs (we didn't have the bandwidth to program dashboards or setup something more demanding) and our non-techs who were super excited to learn SQL and now have some impressive dashboards in Metabase.

This is some shit we would be willing to pay for.

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