evidence VS lightdash

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.

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I'm working on an OSS BI tool focused on a document form factor. Might be of interest to you. https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

> YAML, pivoting being done in the frontend, no symmetric aggregates

(one of the maintainers of Lightdash) You touched on some of our most interesting problems here! Would be especially interested to hear about what you liked / didn't like about symmetric aggregates in Looker and how you find dev with YAML. If you have an idea of how you'd like these to look in Lightdash, the team would be really open to making that a reality.

For pivoting in the backend, this is coming! Issue here: https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash/issues/2907

What are the 5 hottest dbt Repositories one should star on Github 2022?

dbt is a software framework that sits in the middle of the ELT process. It represents the transformative layer after loading data from an original source. Dbt combines SQL with software engineering principles.

Here are my top5!

- Lightdash (https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash): Lightdash converts dbt models and makes it possible to define and easily visualize additional metrics via a visual interface.

- ⏎ re_data (https://github.com/re-data/re-data): Re-Data is an abstraction layer that helps users monitor dbt projects and their underlying data. For example, you get alerts when a test failed or a data anomaly occurs in a dbt project.

- evidence (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence): Evidence is another tool for lightweight BI reporting. With Evidence, you can build simple reports in "medium style" using SQL queries and Markdown.

- Kuwala (https://github.com/kuwala-io/kuwala): With Kuwala, a BI analyst can intuitively build advanced data workflows using a drag-drop interface on top of the modern data stack without coding. Behind the Scenes, the dbt models are generated so that a more experienced engineer can customize the pipelines at any time.

- fal ai (https://github.com/fal-ai/fal): Fal helps to run Python scripts directly from the dbt project. For example, you can load dbt models directly into the Python context which helps to apply Data Science libraries like SKlearn and Prophet in the dbt models.

Lightdash ( https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash ) Lightdash converts dbt models and makes it possible to define and easily visualize additional metrics via a visual interface. The front end helps to understand and extend the underlying SQL queries. Lightdash also visualizes business metrics and makes them shareable with the data team. It is also possible to integrate all data into another visualization tool.

- ⚡️ Lightdash: Lightdash converts dbt models and makes it possible to define and easily visualize additional metrics via a visual interface.

Visualization / Analysis: Lightdash, Superset

Ingestion / ETL: Airbyte, Singer, Jitsu Transformation: dbt Orchestration: Airflow, Dagster Testing: GreatExpectations Observability: Monosi Reverse ETL: Grouparoo, Castled Visualization: Lightdash, Superset

1) An integration with Metabase Cloud is on our roadmap for Q1! We'd love to integrate with Lightdash, but they don't have a public API just yet[1].

2) Several of our customers use us to alert on schema changes in Postgres, specifically so they can get ahead of application database changes that will end up in the warehouse, so you're definitely not alone! Here's a link on how to connect postgres: https://docs.metaplane.dev/docs/postgres

That's an excellent stack and one we kept front and center when building out Metaplane, so definitely let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions here!

[1]: https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash/issues/632

I would recommend lightdash which is essentially an open source Looker clone https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash