Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#2It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)!
I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project.
If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#3I have built several things like this over the years, and used other similar products like redash and metabase. This looks really nice, and has a lot of potential. Lots of nice features like "this is part of a dashboard, be careful when editing". Def bookmarked.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#4Why no REST API data source?
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#5blazer rules, been using it since day one of our startup. it's great for situations where someone on the team needs a graph or CSV download of what's in the database. saves so much time and effort compared to writing code to do the same work. we have written over 100 different queries and dashboards in blazer and use it daily.
ankane is a true wizard; dude has written so many other fabulous tools like searchkick & chartkick.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#6It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)! I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project. If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me:
1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users)
2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead
3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod
4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all the data there
5. Queries were timing out against Snowflake in Blazer (never figured out the problem here, maybe the ruby gem for Snowflake was buggy?)
6. Set up Metabase instead, which worked fine, but non-technical people could never really use it.
(note: I'm a founder, shameless plug below)
This felt like a lot of work. I just wanted a place to dump all my data and easily create reports. Bonus points if non-technical people could do the same. That's what we're going for with Definite (https://www.definite.app/)
1. Built-in data warehouse - We spin up a duckdb database for you
2. 500+ connectors (e.g. Postgres, Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc.) - You don't need to buy a separate ETL, it's also built-in
3. Semantic layer - Define dimensions, measures, and joins using SQL in one place. We have pre-built models for all the sources we support (e.g. the Stripe model already has measures for MRR, churn, etc.)
4. Simple BI - Build a table with the data you want and generate visuals off that table. Works like a pivot table, if you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Definite.
I'm mike@definite.app if anyone wants help getting set up.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#7Why no REST API data source?
Like to query data from SaaS apps? e.g. Hubspot?
The rate limits on most API's like that normally prevent analytical queries. e.g. if you wanted to query all your open deals in Hubspot, it could take several minutes to run the API requests to get the data.
This is normally solved with ETL into a database instead.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#8It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)! I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project. If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me: 1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users) 2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead 3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod 4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all…
> Set up Metabase instead but...
I've been trying to retire metabase but our non technical people love it too much. everyone from marketing to finance has dashboards and alerts and reports.
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#9It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)! I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project. If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me: 1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users) 2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead 3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod 4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all…
This is one of the better landing pages for a product I’ve seen, it’s so succinct. Nicely done. I’m going to actually evaluate your product today as a result
Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
#10It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products ever)! I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project. If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
Was very bummed out when Heroku started charging for Hobby Tier as I had to sunset a few of my hobby apps
- Heroku was my first experience deploying a website: `git push heroku master`
- Dataclips was my first experience writing SQL
Writing code was markedly better than building dashboards in Tableau, which inspired Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - an open-source SSG for creating data websites using SQL and markdown, which I'm now working on
Previous HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)