After reading the comments here, I decided to give Metabase[0] a shot. Awesome analysis tool. Very impressed. Works even with large SQLite databases.
Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
81–90 of 181 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#82As a data scientist (startup / Yahoo) turned product manager (4 startups), I've used a variety of stacks in the past - from plain SQL, to Mode, to Mixpanel, Looker, Interana, and Hive.
Recently we started using PopSQL (https://popsql.com) and love it.
When I don't have a dedicated data team, my philosophy is:
1) Make it difficult to get wrong answers
- Don't use Google Analytics. It's too easy to generate incorrect charts, and too difficult to verify them.
- Have a limited sandbox of reports for non-SQL writers
- Keep the SQL close to the report, so it's easy to verify the underlying query.
- Push people to learn even basic SQL
2) Make it quick and easy to ask iterative questions - PopSQL is way faster than Mode. Like 20x faster.
3) For metrics that matter (e.g. KPIs), instrument them directly and even build a custom analytics dashboard if it's important. (beware dashboard clutter! https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/1193619877489192961 )
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#83Stitch/Fivetran/Custom -> Snowflake -> dbt -> Periscope Lots more documentation here https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/data-team/ We have many of our KPIs embedded in the handbook (look for KPI index mapping link). This is also our primary project where you can see all of our dbt code https://gitlab.com/gitlab-data/analytics/
The gitlab wiki has some amazing content on it. Thanks for making it public.
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#84In my previous company, we did TreasureData->Tableau.
TreasureData is a platform like Segment and lets you bring your customer event data as well as data from SaaS tools (like Salesforce, Zendesk) into a data warehouse hosted by TreasureData. It worked great but had the downside that all the data was in TreasureData and we were kind of locked into it. Segment kind of solves that problem because it has connectors to Redshift/Snowflake etc so you can keep ownership of your data warehouse but the warehouse sync delay (in our version) was a problem.
Also, BI was just one of the use cases. We wanted to send the data to 3rd party tools (like Facebook ads) based on some logic (some were simple rules but we had complex ML driven lead scoring models too). TreasureData was more flexible on being able to run those rules and activate the results but ideally we wanted to run them on top of our own warehouse in AWS.
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#85It's interesting seeing the various stacks being used...Here at One Medical:
[ onemedical.com, mixpanel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc ] -> S3 (Amazon EMR) -> [ Tableau, Aurora MySQL ]
It's a nice & clean stack for data engineering.
Airflow is used for orchestration and is heavily customized with plugins. Zeppelin notebooks are used by most analysts.
We'll probably be replacing Aurora MySQL w/an MPP database like Snowflake or Redshift. MySQL is a crutch, but easy to deploy and manage to a point.
Several python frameworks also do various ETL & data science functions, but everything generally revolves around S3 & Airflow.
Amazon EMR is a great swiss army knife for ETL. Moving between Pig, Spark & Hive is trivial. Tableau is a bit of a challenge. Tableau seems to give users too much rope to hang themselves with.
Also, we're hiring: https://www.onemedical.com/careers/
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#86Postgres -> Metabase I believe this is the best combination of cheap/powerful for early-stage startups. My very non-technical cofounder is able to use metabase's simple GUI interface to create graphs/insights (even joining and aggregating across tables!), and for anything complex I can step in a give a helper SQL query. We have around 10M records we aggregate around for daily insights. Metabase can also be run as a p…
UX guy from Metabase here. Glad to hear it's working well for you. Happy to answer any questions folks might have.
Wow great to see you in the thread. No questions from me but great job on the latest update.
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#87We made our own reporting. Seems crazy to pay multiple 3rd parties to look at our own data. We're using Apache Druid on the back end. (Giant fortune 50 non tech company)
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#88Is there any way that we can provide BI to our customers using an OSS tool?
Our databases store all our users data. I'm thinking of using something like pgsync to sync all database postgres to a new postgres and then having redash or metabase set up to connect.
Alternatively using locked filters on metabase and embedded questions.
All our data for our users are in postgres and they very much want BI insights. Not sure how easiest way for this...
Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#89Re: Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
#90Datacoral, which is our ETL and manages all materialized views within our warehouse, replacing our need for data engineers
Redshift
Mode & Looker