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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?

#41

Post by wantoncl »

petilon wrote: post #30

Reverse question: What tool do you use to get data into the database? Google Forms is great, but if you want the data to go into your own database what tools are available?

I don't use it, but LibreOffice has the Base component that can be a data entry front-end for many ODBC and JDBC supported databases. I think OpenOffice has/had the same.

If you're using Microsoft, you can use MS Access for data entry to similar ODBC and SQL Server backends. If you want to do some VBA programming you can set up a UI in an Excel workbook too.

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

#43

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

We use PowerBI. Wouldn't recommend. I also don't believe it's free, but perhaps that's just the version we use.

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

#44

Post by MaknMoreGtnLess »

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…

What's the closest Tableau alternative that's OSS?

PowerBI?

Apache Superset? https://superset.apache.org

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

#45

Post by mst »

chasil wrote: post #36
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.

I've always preferred to shunt such analytics work over to a query replica dedicated to the purpose so the people doing analytics can generally only interfere with each other.

Whether that's a viable answer in any given situation is of course highly variable, but even if the analytics queries are my own hand-rolled SQL it's still my preference any time it -is- viable if nothing else so I don't have to worry as much about screwing up and taking too many locks / using too few indices while I'm iterating on the query in question.

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

#46

Post by mst »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #26

ReTool. The fact it’s interactive and scriptable with JS makes it better IMO than all other BI tools I’ve seen.

I'm deeply confused as to why people are downvoting this - maybe it's not a suitable answer for many use cases (it doesn't look like it'd be my thing most of the time, certainly), but I'm aware of enough very happy ReTool users to assume it must be useful for at least a decent subset.

Can somebody please explain why they consider this to've been a terrible answer?

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

#47

Post by csdvrx »

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…

It's good, but wait until you discover Mathematica :)

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

#48

Post by js4ever »

Metabase is amazing, it's very intuitive and quick to create questions (widgets) and assemble them in dashboards. I really liked the dashboard subscription to mail, and configurable alerts based on any questions built with the UI or SQL I've literally discovered it last Friday morning and now it's up and running at my company and also for 2 customers.

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

#49

Post by kfk »

MaknMoreGtnLess wrote: post #44
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…

What's the closest Tableau alternative that's OSS? PowerBI? Apache Superset? https://superset.apache.org

In spirit, but with no UI, vega js, they follow the same “grammar of graphics” idea from the same research. Altair does vega charting but in Python. Kibana is using vega in more UI fashion but I haven’t tested it. I think someone should put a proper web ui on top of vega…

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

#50

Post by eatonphil »

MaknMoreGtnLess wrote: post #44
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…

What's the closest Tableau alternative that's OSS? PowerBI? Apache Superset? https://superset.apache.org

I'm working on something in between a BI tool and a SQL IDE. It's definitely code-heavy on the user at the moment compared to a BI tool but an improvement on switching between Python scripts, Postman, a SQL GUI and Excel.

https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

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