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Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?

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Re: Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?

#34

Post by chasil »

Oracle SQL Developer has a data model tab.

This is very much a Java application, and appears to allow several JDBC drivers for 3rd party databases.

It's free, and is designed to compete with (or drag underwater) Quest Software's Toad.

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel...

3rd party drivers:

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldev/t...

Re: Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?

#36

Post by chasil »

go_prodev wrote: post #22

Free: Power BI is probably going to give you everything you need. It's free, easy to use and provides a lot of features to grow into. Paid: If you have the budget, Aqua Data Studio gives you the database management functionality AND all of the visualizations you'll find in Tableau in the 1 product. (My company shifted from Tableau to Power BI. At first it seemed like a beta product with lower fidelity. But Microsoft…

Power Bi has been very abusive of my systems, although this has lessened of late.

I can see hundreds of logins to my database per user, and when I cut the logins per userid to 5, their applications collapse. Their queries cannot be tuned to available indexes according to my users.

They remain the very first ones that I throw off a database if there is a performance problem, with some degree of prejudice.

Re: Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?

#39

Post by wenc »

btown wrote: post #10

This may be an unpopular opinion, but if you have US$70/mo to spare, it's hard to beat Tableau for this exact use case. "Connect to an arbitrary database, create a view that joins numerous tables (including foreign tables, via blending) together, load to columnar storage on a local SSD for performance if necessary, add arbitrary derived columns (including well-defined lateral lookups for things like 'annotate this ac…

Tableau is my go-to too. People think of Tableau as a dashboarding tool (and it is), but it's actually a multidimensional exploratory data analysis tool. You can visualize more than 3 dimensions by way of colors, labels, sizes, etc. You can slice and dice your data and visualize it in so many different ways, and also do drill-downs and filters and aggregations in different ways. The downside is that you have to really understand SQL-like operations (GROUP BY, PARTITION BY, PIVOT) to truly take advantage of its power. Many Tableau users only scratch the surface of what Tableau can do, but there's a lot more underneath.

PowerBI on the other hand is a straight up dashboarding tool. I've used it and it isn't quite as powerful as Tableau, but it's an easier step up from Excel. It doesn't require you reorient your mindset as much as Tableau does. But it also doesn't let you probe your data as easily as Tableau does. It's essentially a supercharged Excel dashboarding tool

Excel viz is rudimentary. It gets the job done for simple plots, but it's a hassle to join data (you have to do cell VLOOKUPs or INDEX(MATCH())) and pivot tables are a poor-man's approximation of the true power of SQL operations. It doesn't scale to large datasets but the cell-based spreadsheet paradigm (vs. a relational database paradigm) is easy to understand which has an appeal of its own. But you're ultimately limited to what fits on a spreadsheet.

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