grouparoo VS Metabase

Reverse ETL is on AirByte's roadmap under the "Future / Not prioritized" section. I wanted to use Grouparoo as a short term solution, but the repo was archived and I think they stopped taking new cloud customers (unknown if this is wrong/outdated).

There are other tools that we will have to adopt in the future but haven’t yet due to lack of necessity. Specifically, one category that is popular in modern data stacks is Reverse ETL (Hightouch, Census, or Grouparoo). We currently don’t have a usecase for piping data back into 3rd party tools but it will definitely come up in the future.

Reverse ETL: Grouparoo, Castled

Grouparoo, the open source Reverse ETL tool we are building, does all of these things. https://www.grouparoo.com

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

Grouparoo | Remote (US) | Remote-OK | https://www.grouparoo.com

Grouparoo is a venture-backed software company building open source data tools that make data reliable, accessible, and actionable. We’re empowering teams to make great customer experiences, driven by data. While engineering teams have gotten good at storing and generating data about their customers, it’s rare that this data is used to its full potential in external applications. Grouparoo makes these integrations easy by providing a framework for defining your customer data and reliably syncing it to external tools.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/grouparoo

Here are our open roles:

- Senior Backend / Lead Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/grouparoo/6ba485d1-a5a4-41f0-9fa5-920a...

- Developer Advocate: https://jobs.lever.co/grouparoo/5e1531b4-7ec8-4c10-8e52-fc23...

Tech Stack: TypeScript / Javascript / Node.js, ActionHero, React + Next.js, Postgres & Redis, and whole lot of third-party APIs!

Congrats on the launch! Hightouch looks great and this need is real. Things seem to be going well, so I don't think I'm taking too much away by mentioning that we have been been working on Grouparoo, an open source alternative that solves similar pain points.

A few differences: git developer workflow focused (branches, CI, PRs, etc), ability to self host, segmentation in destinations (tagging people in mailchimp based on rules, for example)

https://www.grouparoo.com

We are building Grouparoo. Obviously, it's a biased sample but we are seeing a few trends at play.

Has anyone heard or used of reverse etl or Hightouch or open sourced Grouparoo?

Remote Code Execution via H2

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

(nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).