Live data from Hacker News

Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

aws.amazon.com

81–90 of 153 posts

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#81
post #64
post #9

I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over-engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. I'm sure mor…

> one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. My dad started developing software in the late 60s. As a kid (let's say circa 1982, definitely in the minicomputer era), I remember him talking about a problem at work: to do all their daily processing, they needed about 28 hours. A lot of the workload was reporting, so he asked managers what reports were no longer useful. Naturally, he was assur…

We do the same thing with physical servers and network ports. If no one knows what it does, unplug it and see what breaks or who complains. :)

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#82
post #19

We use Chartio at my company. If you haven't tried it yet, this product is stellar - almost all of our BI needs are handled directly by stakeholders rather than having to go through an engineer, and their support is very helpful and responsive. I would consider moving off to something like Quicksight if it supported redis. Some of our BI-related data is stored there, and currently to get at it we have an app that pro…

Have you tried using Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers? There's a redis fdw that will allow you to use SQL from Postgres and query the keys in Redis.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/sql-createforeignd...

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#83
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fog creek is nice, but you're working on small localized projects compared to Amazons scale and breadth. Amazon employees are pushed hard, and that's their key to shipping innovation. Look at Googles cuddle farm - Lots of innovation that rarely ships and no risk taking. How about Apple - Constrained innovation, low risk, Once a year shipping. And there's a hundred other CEOs and companies that just don't come close.…

Under those metrics, almost all of Amazon's products have been flops and none are not any way similar to the cash cows that Google and Apple have managed to develop and maintain without succumbing to competitors. I don't think that having to run rust to stay in place the way Amazon does is a sustainable business strategy.

As an investor I'm not looking for Thiels "sustainable business strategy", I want growth. New products, new markets, pushing the envelope.

And that comes from taking risks,, shipping, and dealing with failures. Google and Apple are simply not doing that in a meaningful way, and their share price reflects that.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#84
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone here.

One manager's decision can make the work of hundreds of people worthless or even destructive. I've lived thru and seen it. Like it or not the shot callers at the top wield enormous influence and the ones who make consistently good decisions should be celebrated for that.

You are right - one bad decision can destroy a project/product.

But the opposite is not necessarily true. To ship insanely great things, you need a lot of factors to come together, not just one person's decision (although it helps).

Steve Jobs kept using ideas from the people who worked from him (presenting them later as his ideas). Yes, he had great intuition and good taste to choose the better ideas, but without the people who generated these ideas, he would have been yet another arrogant, loudmouth suit.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#85
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as I understand BI, also for when you want complex graphs that can't be easily modeled in Excel. With BI solutions you can perform "slices" as they call it, of multi-dimensional data (cubes), and then represent that as graphs that can also be used for drill-down on one or more dimensions of said data. When you have say 17 dimensions, these solutions are easier to use than using excel to try to do the same. I have…

It's all just pivot tables, in the end. Excel solved most data slicing/drilldown problems years ago. Only issue has always been data size limits and access to live, up to data data (though Excel's also been able to hit external OLAP services for data for a long time too).

I'd like to affirm your claim that Pivot Tables and Excel can match pretty much any BI related inquiry where data is available. Caveat - the data will fit in Excel

Source: Experience in Wall Street, Fortune 500 risk management, and dumping stuff from SalesForce to make it useable beyond what our implementation would report (or what leadership could get it to do).

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#86
post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

He strikes me as someone that had a couple brilliant fundamental insights, which compose the core of the business. But if one starts thinking everything one shits out is gold on the basis of such insights, one ends up with the Fire phone. However, that sort of thing is not likely to be a true problem for the business for quite a while. They can waste a lot of money and time before it ever becomes a problem.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#87

For me, the most interesting part is SPICE. To implement a data warehouse, one creates a star schema (OLAP) database from a regular OLTP database. This involves massive amount of work. It looks like SPICE aims to replace the need for OLAP database and produce similar data directly from OLTP systems. I would love to know more about this engine. I hope Amazon open sources the engine (I highly doubt that they will do it…

My question is how does SPICE differ from BigQuery? I can connect to BigQuery from Tableau, BIME, Chartio, etc.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#88
post #26

Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs. I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? E…

I work at Domo, in the team that covers the Bay Area. How long ago did you use the product?

We dogfood it obsessively internally. Have found it extremely frictionless on the sharing side.

Two ways to share:

1. For an internal use case, you can native "@-tag" any other user. https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz

2. For an external sharing use-case, you can share a slideshow. Live example (fake data): https://modocorp.domo.com/link/rFgvIVi32QpwmthO

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#89
post #26

Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs. I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? E…

I work at Domo, in the team that covers the Bay Area. How long ago did you use the product? We dogfood it obsessively internally. Have found it extremely frictionless on the sharing side. Two ways to share: 1. For an internal use case, you can native "@-tag" any other user. https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz 2. For an external sharing use-case, you can share a slideshow. Live example (fake data): https://modocorp.…

I use it regularly. It's not so much about sharing,which is easy and works well, but about getting data into Domo. Pain point to format data and schedule exports, update them, set up new exports, etc.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#90
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Domo, in the team that covers the Bay Area. How long ago did you use the product? We dogfood it obsessively internally. Have found it extremely frictionless on the sharing side. Two ways to share: 1. For an internal use case, you can native "@-tag" any other user. https://www.domo.com/product/domobuzz 2. For an external sharing use-case, you can share a slideshow. Live example (fake data): https://modocorp.…

I use it regularly. It's not so much about sharing,which is easy and works well, but about getting data into Domo. Pain point to format data and schedule exports, update them, set up new exports, etc.

Got it. Is it a data-source you're pulling in from a connector, or from an on-prem system? We've recently added almost 100 self-serve connectors. https://www.domo.com/connectors

I've been talking to the product team a lot about related feedback lately. If you want to share your thoughts, I'd love to take them down, and make sure they get to the right folks.

Also, have you seen the new export API? It could solve part of the problem you mention. adam.chavez at domo

Post reply on HN