This looks great as a promise - I looked into visualizations provided, and we need much more than what's provided though
Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
81–90 of 109 posts
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#82This looks a bit like https://metabase.com -- anyone used both and can make a comparison?
Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
Sorry to hear that (I'm the UX guy at MB). Would appreciate your thoughts/feedback on any specifics you want to share. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
My startup seriously evaluated Metabase, but inevitably you'll want joins, and Metabase is fundamentally opposed to the idea: https://metabase.com/blog/Joins/ ... and if you're writing SQL for your views, you might as well be writing SQL. We ended up shelling out for Tableau - it's pricey at $840/yr, but it supports joins out of the box (it even has a drag-and-drop interface to set up joins!), has practically every b…
(I work at Metabase, and am working on the joins feature as we speak)
As getsauce mentioned, we're adding joins to the next release, as well as essentially subqueries in what we're calling the "notebook". That should unlock a lot of power.
AMA.
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#84This looks a bit like https://metabase.com -- anyone used both and can make a comparison?
Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
I really wanted to like Metabase but unfortunately it's way behind its promise. I made an attempt to use it in a customer project for creating very basic customizable dashboard-like statistics, with little to no success. Just to name a few pain points:
- using the docker image is easy; not so using the jar file especially due to very little documentation
- confusing UI paired with lack of extensive documentation
- this makes it far from "easy" to be used by "everyone in your company" (quotes from metabase marketing claim): you really have to know how to do things, even easy ones like changing labels
- the UI contains many minor bugs which sometimes lead to unsavable metrics and you have just start from scratch
- no build-in way to export dashboards, which makes it nearly impossible to test your new metrics on a different system before pushing it to production; if you really want to do this, you have to juggle with database dumps
There might be some valid use cases for metabase, but I don't think it's very usable for non-technical users. I strongly suggest to evaluate it thoroughly before counting on it.
Nevertheless thanks for making it open source and free to use, so don't get me wrong.
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#85Can I use this if all I have is an odbc connection?
I have the opposite issue is there a way to connect to a cloud database without an ODBC connection?
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#86This looks a bit like https://metabase.com -- anyone used both and can make a comparison?
Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
We use it for live and love it. Also new few companies who do use it on fairly big data flow.
I am not sure why you are frustrated with UI, myself and colleagues find it quite good.
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#87Oh nice - thank you very much! :-D
I thought about writing my own app for exactly that task but when I see yours I think I don't need to do that anymore. Awesome! :-)
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#88At what scale has this been tested? As in, are you aware of any data file size limits? I have a csv with ~6M rows and when paging through the docs the "Exploring your data source" gave me pause thinking this app might try and open all 6M rows at once. Will I be OK importing such a large source or will my computer turn into a space heater before refusing to respond?
Ananas has been tested on production processing terabyte data on a daily basis (with Google Dataflow, but you can achieve the same thing with your own spark cluster too).
In term of exploring large source file, the design principle is to paginate any kind of data that support random access records (for example CSV, logs, etc). So when "exploring the data" of a CSV with 6M rows, Ananas will not load 6M rows at once, but read a few rows at a time for each page. For example, in this early demo video, exploring a 755M CSV file in seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwqZlhmei78&t=01m00s
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious if anyone has used Metabase for serious work and can comment on it. I tried setting it up and got frustrated pretty quickly with the UX. It looks slick, but the mental model was confusing...
Sorry to hear that (I'm the UX guy at MB). Would appreciate your thoughts/feedback on any specifics you want to share. Thanks!
I'm a fan of your work! We use Metabase pretty frequently.
The only nitpicks I have are around the concept of Metrics (still not quite sure what those are or how they're useful for me) and the initial download size of the libraries takes quite a while (especially over unstable VPN links)
I'm wondering if there's a way to have an option where it tries an external CDN first and then falls back to loading from the hosting server.
Re: Show HN: Ananas – a hackable data tool for beginners
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
My startup seriously evaluated Metabase, but inevitably you'll want joins, and Metabase is fundamentally opposed to the idea: https://metabase.com/blog/Joins/ ... and if you're writing SQL for your views, you might as well be writing SQL. We ended up shelling out for Tableau - it's pricey at $840/yr, but it supports joins out of the box (it even has a drag-and-drop interface to set up joins!), has practically every b…
(I work at Metabase, and am working on the joins feature as we speak) As getsauce mentioned, we're adding joins to the next release, as well as essentially subqueries in what we're calling the "notebook". That should unlock a lot of power. AMA.
Big fan of Metabase, thanks for all your work!
I've always been curious if there is a feature in the works for charting or displaying comparisons across defined timespans (e.g. total page views this week vs. last week)