superset VS Metabase

Superset is absolutely phenomenal. I really hope Microsoft eventually releases all of their customizations they made to it internally to the OS community someday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY0SSvSUkMA

https://github.com/apache/superset/discussions/20094

I recently ran a little shootout between Superset, Metabase, and Lightdash. All have nontrivial weaknesses but I ended up picking Lightdash.

Superset the best of them at _data visualization_ but I honestly found it almost useless for self-serve _BI_ by business users. This issue on how to do joins in Superset (with stalebot making a mess XD) is everything difficult about Superset for BI in a nutshell. https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/8645

Metabase is pretty great and it's definitely the right choice for a startup looking to get low cost BI set up. It still has a very table centric view, but feels built for _BI_ rather than visualization alone.

Lightdash has significant warts (YAML, pivoting being done in the frontend, no symmetric aggregates) but the Looker inspiration is obvious and it makes it easy to present _groups of tables_ to business users ready to rock. I liked Looker before Google acquired it. My business users are comfortable with star and snowflake schemas (not that they know those words) and it was easy to drop Lightdash on top of our existing data warehouse.

Or like not being able to delete a user without running some SQL:

https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/13345

Almostl instantly run into this issue setting up a test instance of Superset. And the issue has been around for years.

Are you interested in trying out Superset, but you're intimidated by the local setup process? Worry not! Superset needs some initial setup to install locally, but I've got a streamlined way to get started - using the makefile! This file contains a set of scripts to simplify the setup process.

Recently I discovered BigQuery public datasets - just over 200 datasets available for directly querying via SQL. I think this is a great thing! I can connect these direct to an analytics platform (we use Apache Superset which uses Python SQLAlchemy under the hood) for example and just start dashboarding.

if they don't want to pay for powerbi, can try something like https://superset.apache.org/

In today's fast-paced data-driven world, organizations must analyze data in real-time to make timely and informed decisions. Real-time data analytics enables businesses to gain valuable insights, respond to real-time events, and stay ahead of the competition. Also, the analytics engine must be capable of running analytical queries and returning results in real-time. In this article, we will explore how you can build a real-time data analytics solution using the open-source tools Redpanda a distributed streaming platform, Apache Superset, a data visualization, and a business intelligence platform, combined with RisingWave a streaming database.

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).