Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#11

Post by written-beyond »

matsz wrote: post #5
written-beyond wrote: post #2

This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation. I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway. I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case…

> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. A layer on top of the database to account for auth/etc. would be necessary anyways. Could be achieved to some degree with views, but I'd prefer an approach where you choose the publicly available data explicitly. GraphQL almost delivered on that dream. Something more opinionated woul…

That's exactly what I meant. It's a specific replica instance with it's own security etc. but not necessarily a separate API you try to integrate too. APIs can stay for writes, but for reads you have the db

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#12

Post by jorin »

piterrro wrote: post #8

In what extent this is a metabase alternative? I'm a heavy Metabase user and there's nothing to compare really in this product.

hi, dev building Shaper here. Both, Shaper and Metabase, can be used to build dashboards for business intelligence functionality and embedded analytics. But the use cases are different: Metabase is feature-rich and has lots of functionality for self-serve that allows non-technical users to easily build their own dashboards and drill down as they please. With Shaper you define everything as code in SQL. It's much more minimal in terms of what you can configure, but if you like the SQL-based approach it can be pretty productive to treat dashboards as code.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#13

Post by jorin »

written-beyond wrote: post #2

This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation. I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway. I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case…

hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards. Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere. We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#15

Post by jorin »

3abiton wrote: post #14

As someone who used duckdb but not shaper, what is shaper used for? The readme is scarce on details.

hi, dev building shaper here. shaper allows you to visualize data and build dashboards just by writing sql. the sql runs in duckdb so you can use all duckdb features. its for when you are looking for a minimal tool that allows you to just work in code. you can use shaper to build dashboards that you share internally or also for customer-facing dashboards you want to embed into another application.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#17

Post by antman »

jorin wrote: post #15
3abiton wrote: post #14

As someone who used duckdb but not shaper, what is shaper used for? The readme is scarce on details.

hi, dev building shaper here. shaper allows you to visualize data and build dashboards just by writing sql. the sql runs in duckdb so you can use all duckdb features. its for when you are looking for a minimal tool that allows you to just work in code. you can use shaper to build dashboards that you share internally or also for customer-facing dashboards you want to embed into another application.

Will it expose a visual query builder as metabase?

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#18

Post by piterrro »

jorin wrote: post #12
piterrro wrote: post #8

In what extent this is a metabase alternative? I'm a heavy Metabase user and there's nothing to compare really in this product.

hi, dev building Shaper here. Both, Shaper and Metabase, can be used to build dashboards for business intelligence functionality and embedded analytics. But the use cases are different: Metabase is feature-rich and has lots of functionality for self-serve that allows non-technical users to easily build their own dashboards and drill down as they please. With Shaper you define everything as code in SQL. It's much more…

sorry, so it ain't an alternative in any way. Its like saying a bicycle is an alternative to an airplane, both have seats...

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#19

Post by written-beyond »

jorin wrote: post #13
written-beyond wrote: post #2

This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation. I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway. I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case…

hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards. Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere. We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.

It would be a game changer, very interesting to see this grow. How did you get your PDF generation so good?

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#20

Post by jorin »

written-beyond wrote: post #19
jorin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards. Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere. We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.

It would be a game changer, very interesting to see this grow. How did you get your PDF generation so good?

happy to hear that! pdfs are generated in a headless chrome in the same docker container as shaper itself using chromedp.
Post reply on HN