Blazer VS evidence

I try to avoid these tools wherever possible, given the choice I'd always go for tools like Blazer.

https://github.com/ankane/blazer

No such luck in my current role, Looker and PowerBI are both in use by different bits of the org and nobody has the ability to delve into the underlying figures.

As u/jaxn said you could use Blazer for this kind of thing. I would also look into materialized views or custom tables and a scheduled job that calculates the metrics they care about. That will take you a long way. Eventually you can use something like Metabase but I would put that off for as long as possible as it's really expensive and pretty involved.

And it's Open Source: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

I'd also highly recommend Blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer if you are into the Ruby on Rails world. It's super solid, and it's been an indispensable tool integrated to all my projects.

I use Ahoy too, but I don't have very good visibility into the data. I should spend more time building queries and creating charts. I should probably set up blazer as well: https://github.com/ankane/blazer

blazer

The Blazer gem provides a nice way to analyze the results easily. It is simple to install and allows SQL queries to run against tables. The query here shows that the candidate implementation is significantly faster than the original.

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

It’s interesting to me how far you have pushed the SQL language in this framework, such that it truly is “SQL only”.

The challenge as I see it with enabling analysts to build websites is that you need to build abstractions to get from familiar (SQL, yaml) - the language of analytics, to new (HTML, CSS, JS) - the language of the web browser

As one of the maintainers of Evidence (https://evidence.dev), one of the things I’ve often considered is how accessible our syntax is to analysts. Our syntax combines SQL and Markdown, with MDX style components e.g.

The are inherently webdev-ey, and I do think they put off potential users.

On the flip-side, by adhering to web standards, you get extensibility out of the box, and working out what to do is just a Google search away.

Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking piece.

Dataclips was my first experiences writing SQL.

Writing code was a markedly better DX that building dashboards in Tableau, which is why I'm now working on https://evidence.dev - a SSG for creating data from SQL and markdown

Previous HN discussions:

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

Full fledged BI tools like Superset and Metabase are amazing for their intended use cases.

But they may be an overkill if your primary use case is to infrequently build semi-interactive reports for non-technical end-users and your use cases are are mostly covered by standard graphs & tables. Esp. so if you are familiar with SQL and have access to the underlying data source. Two nifty utilities I have found to be very useful for latter kind of use cases are SQLPage and Evidence.

They make it very convenient to whip out some SQL and convert that to a neat professional looking web ui that can be forwarded to an end user. In case of Evidence it is a statically generated site, and in case of SQLPage it is a web app that connects to a live database.

SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/

Evidence: https://evidence.dev

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

The new direction seems very similar to what evidence has been doing for a while

https://evidence.dev

I'm quite excited about this, and would also love to have it distributed as an NPM package.

I work on an OSS web framework for reporting/ decision support applications (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence), and we use WASM duckDB as our query engine. Several folks have asked for PRQL support, and this looks like it could be a pretty seamless way to add it.

> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience.

Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is 100% the place to focus on improving.

If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence)

It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.

---