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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?

#131
post #36

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.

Your users may benefit from using import mode rather than direct query mode.

Under the covers Power BI is running a tabular Analysis Services Cube, so import mode will be optimized for reporting regardless of the source database indexing.

The PBI dataset can be shared across users, so only 1 connection is required to update it, instead of dozens of users hitting the db directly.

Also as another person mentioned, reporting is usually done on an separate database to production applications like an operational data store, data lake, or warehouse.

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

#132

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.

I guess it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish.

The desktop version is free, no strings attached. However the value comes from publishing to the web service for sharing etc. That's not free. It can be cheap, but when you have a lot of users the "premium capacity" can be quite expensive.

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

#133
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For personal analytics the desktop version is free. The web service has different pricing tiers (which can be very expensive) Edit...just to add to this. I personally pay for it and it's $5/mth. Premium capacity can be a lot more...but if the Data Scientist needed a license, it may have only been $5/mth, paltry compared to a data scientist salary.

It was a non-profit, every single EUR had to be accounted for. On the good side, they did get heavy discounts on some licenses, including from Microsoft Windows/Office. Except IT manager didn't know (even though he was a Microsoft fanboy), he only figured that out after paying full price for years...

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm curious why you don't recommend PowerBI. What are the pain points?

Thankfully my memory is cloudy :-) maybe two points:

1. In general the idea of a separate reporting DB maintained by separate people who might not understand the semantics of schema changes seems inefficient in a world of cheap compute, compared to an application exposing key metrics directly. Upgrading every two weeks with an ETL pipeline off an app can result in RTL breaking every two weeks. Better just to release metrics from the same team that makes any other changes.

2. I think connecting hosted PowerBI to a IP-whitelisted Azure blob store is not possible, and that just seemed silly.

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

#137
You can use DronaHQ ( a low code tool builder with drag and drop UI components to quickly build dashboards, frontends, etc) to visualize your data from sql table or other databases via table grid, plotly charts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfaqaC2rdzs

Give it a go at https://www.dronahq.com

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