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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?

#51

Post by 1123581321 »

mst wrote: post #46
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?

Could be reflexive downvoting due to a perception that "low code" is not a data tool (I would disagree with this.) It could also be because Retool's reputation took a bit of a bit on HN several months ago (though marak has since taken an even bigger reputational hit...): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252066

Just guesses.

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

#52

Post by MaknMoreGtnLess »

eatonphil wrote: post #50
MaknMoreGtnLess wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hey! Thank You for creating datastation.

Are there some videos that walk a user through setting it up to using it?

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

#53

Post by eyeball »

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…

I used to like qlik more than pbi/tableau but they stopped making the personal desktop version free. Qlik’s scripting and “associative” engine is great.

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

#54

Post by eatonphil »

MaknMoreGtnLess wrote: post #52
eatonphil wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hey! Thank You for creating datastation. Are there some videos that walk a user through setting it up to using it?

There are primarily a bunch of tutorials for getting started [0] (these are up to date) and some old videos (not up to date) [1].

[0] https://datastation.multiprocess.io/docs/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGOQFKonPUVo5LgxQDW26yg/vid...

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

#55

Post by NoNotTheDuo »

jraph wrote: post #19

No plots and statistics (well, maybe, but I've not used them if there are there). But DBeaver is nice to browse a database. For SQLite databases, I use sqlitebrowser. Both tools are open source.

DBeaver is my choice. Saw it being used at Re:Invent by a presenter a few years back and switched immediately. I had been using SQLDeveloper and don't miss it one bit.

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

#57

Post by Fnoord »

robertlagrant wrote: post #43
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.

PowerBI is not free to use, its part of Office 365 (Microsoft 365 or whatever it is called today). I remember 2 companies ago (in 2019) some data scientists had to get a license for it approved.

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

#58

Post by sa46 »

glogla wrote: post #7
MaknMoreGtnLess wrote: post #2

apache superset or its commercialized offer: ‎Preset (Cloud)

> or its commercialized offer: ‎Preset (Cloud) Which includes free version for five users. But it is SaaS so your database has to be visible from the internet. I really like it though.

Not sure about Preset specifically, but most SaaS vendors advertise their IP address so you can limit incoming database connections to the SaaS vendor’s IP address.

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

#59

Post by sfifs »

Nowadays this is pretty much the space of either PowerBI or Tableau.

There used to be a lot of good candidates in this space even just a few years ago but Power BI has improved it's product and integrations very rapidly and with its affordability has displaced them at many big companies. Power BI also recently added some NLP capabilities from one of Microsoft's acquisitions which makes usage by non technical users easier.

If you're willing to put your data on BigQuery, then Google Data Studio / Looker is an even better solution for larger datasets due to the seamless integration and intelligent caching which (purely in my perception) seems to work better than Azure Analytics Services in the Microsoft side. Also BigQueryML works within SQL.

Source: i lead an Analytics and Data Science team at a Fortune 50

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

#60

Post by reureu »

jslove wrote: post #14
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…

As you get deeper into it they hook you into the server and other stuff and it ends up costing 000s. Pandas is better but requires programming.

I second pandas, and would also highlight seaborn, plotly, and dash as complimentary data visualization libraries.

Tableau is fine for what it is, but I've found that the requests from stakeholders often grow to a point where you either can't do it in Tableau or have to move mountains to get it to work... so, in essence, sunk cost fallacy makes tableau millions.

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