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A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

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Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#31

Post by conormccarter »

AgharaShyam wrote: post #26
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…

100% agreed regarding shipping a read-replica, for any sufficiently complex enterprise app (ERP, CRM, accounting, etc.). Customers need it to build custom reports, archive data into a warehouse, drive downstream systems (notifications, audits, compliance), and answer edge-case questions you didn’t anticipate. Because of that, I generally prefer these patterns over a half-baked built-in analytics UI or an opinionated…

I fully agree in spirit, but in practice, read-replica's have some edge cases that are hard to control for. Namely, the incentives aren't fully aligned between the database host and consumer, and that dynamic can lead to some difficult resourcing decisions for the DB host. Whereas an API can be rate limited or underlying API queries can be optimized (however frustrating that might be for consumers).

The CDC stream option you flagged is more viable in my (admittedly biased) opinion. At my company (Prequel) our entire pitch is basically "you should give your customer's a live replica of their data in whatever data platform they want it in" (and let us handle the cross-platform compatibility & multi-tenant DB challenges).

I think this problem could also be a killer use case for Open Table Formats, where the read-replica architecture can be mirrored but the cost of reader compute can be assumed by the data consumer.

To your point, this is only going to be more important with what will likely be a dramatic increase in AI agent data consumption.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#32

Post by skeeter2020 »

pletnes wrote: post #10
robowo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it daily and it never crashed. How long ago was this? I am a big fan of DuckDB. Plow through hundrets of GB of logs on a 5 year old linux laptop - no problem.

Same here. I have however seen a few out of memory cases in the past when given large input files.

it's not the focus or very performant but you can have it spill to disk if you run out of memory. I wouldn't suggest building a solution based on this approach though; the sweet-spot is memory-constrained.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#33

Post by SebTi »

jorin wrote: post #21
antman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it expose a visual query builder as metabase?

shaper leans into doing everything as code. instead of using a custom UI you can use your own editor and AI agent to generate dashboards for you. shaper is for people happy to use code. it doesn't try to provide self-serve functionality.

And I think that's exactly what makes it so clever. Three years ago, I would have considered this decision risky. But with the live sync feature and "just SQL" as the language for the dashboard builder, it's so powerful—thanks to Claude Code, for example!

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#35

Post by written-beyond »

oogali wrote: post #23
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. Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1]. In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by…

Aaaaaah I had a professor rave about Crystal Reports once. Didn't know it had such gilded history.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#36

Post by owlstuffing »

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 think we lost the plot as an industry

I get your point, but generally with most enterprise-scale apps you really don’t want your transactional DB doubling as your data warehouse. The “push-based” operation should be limited to moving data from your tx environment to your analytical one.

Of course, if the “analytics” are limited to simple static reports, then a data warehouse is overkill.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#37

Post by cjonas »

Is there anyway to run the query -> report generation standalone in process? Like maybe just outputting the html (or using the React components in a project).

I was looking to add similar report generation to a vscode-extension I've been building[0]

[0](https://github.com/ChuckJonas/duckdb-vscode)

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#38

Post by written-beyond »

mrits wrote: post #27
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…

Customers don’t want to learn your schema or deal with your clever optimizations either. If you expose a DB make sure you abstract everything away in a view and treat it like a versioned API.

The best example for this are iot devices that share their data. Instead of reinventing the wheel for a dashboard for each customer just give them some docs and restricted access via a replica.

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#39

Post by victorbjorklund »

mritchie712 wrote: post #28
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.

We've ( https://www.definite.app/ ) replaced quite a few metabase accounts now and we have a built-in lakehouse using duckdb + ducklake, so I feel comfortable calling us a "duckdb-based metabase alternative". When I see the title here, I think "BI with an embedded database", which is what we're building at Definite. A lot of people want dashboards / AI analysis without buying Snowflake, Fivetran, BI and stitching the…

Not open source though?

Re: A DuckDB-based metabase alternative

#40

Post by jastr »

pletnes wrote: post #10
robowo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it daily and it never crashed. How long ago was this? I am a big fan of DuckDB. Plow through hundrets of GB of logs on a 5 year old linux laptop - no problem.

Same here. I have however seen a few out of memory cases in the past when given large input files.

By default, it tries to take 80% of your memory. I've found that you need to set it to something much smaller in ~/.duckdbrc `set max_memory='1GB';`
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