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Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

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Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#21

Post by MattJ100 »

inhumantsar wrote: post #8
mritchie712 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, what's the motivation behind retiring metabase? (especially if people love it as you say)

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#22

Post by jnettome »

3dsnano wrote: post #5

blazer 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 & ch…

kudos for ankane! I make use of his gems on every single project I run. Ahoy is great too!

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#23

Post by mosselman »

I love blazer. At our scaleup “making a blazer” has become a phrase among the non technical colleagues.

I’ve created a feature where you can share CSVs from a clip and import the data into Google sheets. There is a PR for this on the repo.

I’ve also created cron job monitoring with it. You can read up about that here: https://abuisman.com/posts/developer-tools/cron-monitoring-w...

Andrew Kane’s gems are a gold mine. Ahoy is another great one and he also created pgvector. Humbling amount of work.

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#26

Post by Rafert »

voberoi wrote: post #2

It'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.

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no customizability at all.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.

In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase [1]: https://docs.render.com/deploy-metabase

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#27

Post by pianoben »

Blazer is amazing software. Simple, robust, useful, and non-technical people can easily get the data they need, by themselves. Blazer Checks are a whole added dimension!

The only downside is that, by virtue of its simplicity, it's not well-suited to fine-grained access controls or other similar compliance concerns. In fact, those concerns have fomented maybe three serious attempts at my job to remove Blazer and replace it with $BI_TOOL_DU_JOUR. Each time, these massively-funded vendor tools just abjectly failed to do what Blazer does, and each have been phased out. Blazer is undefeated :)

When I start a company, Blazer will be one of the first bits of infrastructure I stand up.

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#28

Post by [deleted] »

mosselman wrote: post #23

I love blazer. At our scaleup “making a blazer” has become a phrase among the non technical colleagues. I’ve created a feature where you can share CSVs from a clip and import the data into Google sheets. There is a PR for this on the repo. I’ve also created cron job monitoring with it. You can read up about that here: https://abuisman.com/posts/developer-tools/cron-monitoring-w... Andrew Kane’s gems are a gold mine.…

[deleted]

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#29

Post by mritchie712 »

kak3a wrote: post #20
mritchie712 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are those 500+ data source connectors are implemented? Do you use 3rd party APIs? Im always curious about that.

Great question. We're using Meltano (https://hub.meltano.com/extractors), so no third party (we host the meltano jobs on our infra for you).

Re: Blazer: Business intelligence made simple

#30

Post by apsurd »

pianoben wrote: post #27

Blazer is amazing software. Simple, robust, useful , and non-technical people can easily get the data they need, by themselves. Blazer Checks are a whole added dimension! The only downside is that, by virtue of its simplicity, it's not well-suited to fine-grained access controls or other similar compliance concerns. In fact, those concerns have fomented maybe three serious attempts at my job to remove Blazer and repl…

funny you mention blazer being a target for removal by big co. happened at instacart too! As the company scales, teams bring in the stuff they know. Like tableau. Tableau seems so terrible, ungodly slow, and stuck in 1990. i must be missing something as a non-data scientist.

anyway, same as you said, blazer was in constant threat of being "phased out". It's a hollow wish by the powers that be. blazer is too useful.

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