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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#351

Post by stewbrew »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #259
stewbrew wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how many seats are needed to hire somebody who creates a custom shiny + R app that does exactly what you want? How big is the average company that makes use of tableau etc.? Let's do the math ...

It’s 2019. Are we seriously still trying to argue that homegrown solutions are overall more cost effective than SaaS? Are we still of the opinion that developing tooling outside of your company’s core competencies is somehow adding value?

Well it's probably a question of perspective and problem domain. Also my main concern is precision and correctness. Quite often you can choose between (1) customized tools that achieve almost what you want them to do, but often the people who implemented or customized them didn't fully understand the problem and did things wrong without anyone noticing for a long time, or (2) custom tools that do exactly what you want, that were tested by somebody who cares.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#352

Post by danielscrubs »

hello_moto wrote: post #175
danielscrubs wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don’t know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I’ve worked with a lot of BI people. I’m convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!

PowerBI is not for developer. It's for Data Scientist/Business Analyst. Someone will come and build the dataset (or known as model) and the BA/DS can start building visualization that make sense to tell story about the company (or to tell the story about something). It's a whole different market/profession.

Reproducibility is the number one rule in (data) science...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#353

Post by geophph »

qwert-e wrote: post #161
kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

> I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It’s a free and open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python only.

Another +1 for Dash!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#354

Post by stonecharioteer »

nicolaskruchten wrote: post #252
ruoyucad wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

That's not totally accurate... If you use our SaaS Chart Studio product then yes, but otherwise (i.e. in 'offline' mode) you can use our Python, R and Javascript libraries as much as you like: they're MIT licensed.

I'd like to add that Dash helped me grok React far quicker than I'd expected. I code in a lot of React now and I'm only here because of Dash. Thank you for your hard work!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#355

Post by danielscrubs »

da_chicken wrote: post #334
radicalbyte wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is :) You have to normalize data taken from various sources of various age and complexity. So you really have to understand the data. You also have to really understand the questions. I've worked with (and on) lots of these tools and projects; the complexity is never in the frontend, it's dominated by getting the data, getting the data right and into the right format. If all you want in the end is a good looki…

This basically reads like, "You need to have a data engineer." Or half an engineer and half an analyst.

Let’s say you have 20000 tables in total for a company. They are in 10 different databases. You have no overview over the data and no comments. You don’t have a starting point for where information x are.

Welcome to my reality.

Would I love a data architect and a domain expert in my team? Yeah.

Will I run around booking meetings with everyone that even hints at working with data like a headless hen? Yeah.

Is this the normal procedure for Data Scientists in big and old companies? More so than I would like.

Oh! And I forgot that the security department will constantly deny your access to data you need (until you force their hand).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#356

Post by rdgthree »

dvdhsu wrote: post #261
anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

Unrelated to the tool, your homepage is absolutely gorgeous. I imagine the rest of your execution is along those lines, which is to say - excellent. Well done!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#357

Post by scarejunba »

dvdhsu wrote: post #300
scarejunba wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I’d pay you for that. That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork…

Thanks for the feedback — that's really helpful. I agree that our pricing isn't good for a large org that is looking to build a tool or two (instead of say, a few hundred). Do you mind if I email you? (I can't see your email in your profile, but my email is david@retool.in if you're interested in reaching out.) I'm really curious — just to learn — what kind of pricing plan might work for you. Would a per-app model wo…

I've since left the company but one of my friends working there is the one who suggested we try the product anyway. I'll tell him to contact you.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#358

Post by rqmedes »

stewbrew wrote: post #232
dustingetz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDBMS = data silo

You make it sound as if this were a bad thing. RDBMS work well for many use cases. There are plenty of tools around to work with them. Good open source implementations exist.

The problem space (Business) is not complex, its incredibly simple. Unfortunately the design patterns we use and the tooling is flawed. It has been this way for at least 25 years and the RDBMS, languages, design patterns, and architectures ( 2-tier/ 3-tier) are the cause.

They make it simple to get started and even without knowing what you are doing you can easily churn out something that works if it is simple, doesn't change often, doesn't need to scale and deals with small amounts of data.

But similar to http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/the-vietnam-of-computer-scie...

"It represents a quagmire which starts well, gets more complicated as time passes, and before long entraps its users in a commitment that has no clear demarcation point, no clear win conditions, and no clear exit strategy."

RDBMS are the root cause.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#359

Post by kfk »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #271
kfk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The businesses are coming with requests that require complex SQL on millions of records of data that normally is sitting in various sources (warehouse, salesforce, etc.). Unless you hire expensive data engineers, you can't do this type of work reliably. You can stick things together with expensive GUI oriented prep tools like Alteryx, but you pay in reliability and, quite frankly, sleep. And forget IT, IT is so stuck…

Expensive data engineer here, I see nothing wrong with this >:)

I am hiring one in Krakow! Seriously though, in a team of 10 business analysts I can barely afford 1 data engineer. Business analysts tend to cost less and also be more "business focuses", so they are an easier sell to management.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#360

Post by jjeaff »

rqmedes wrote: post #358
stewbrew wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound as if this were a bad thing. RDBMS work well for many use cases. There are plenty of tools around to work with them. Good open source implementations exist.

The problem space (Business) is not complex, its incredibly simple. Unfortunately the design patterns we use and the tooling is flawed. It has been this way for at least 25 years and the RDBMS, languages, design patterns, and architectures ( 2-tier/ 3-tier) are the cause. They make it simple to get started and even without knowing what you are doing you can easily churn out something that works if it is simple, doesn…

I feel like you are coming from an alternate universe. Nosql is the quick and easy thing to start with, then your needs become more and more complex and nosql just won't cut it anymore. Sure, nosql can scale and perform, but only if your needs are very specific and simple.

There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms.

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