Metabase VS lightdash

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).

> 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