Ask HN: How does your support/sales/management inspect production DB data? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does your support/sales/management inspect production DB data?

9 pointstsenkov6 comments

When you build a new product, there rarely is time to build rich internal websites to query production data and, in my experience, teams always resort to making scripts for the non-development part of the team, which are horrible to support (changes are hard to sync throughout the team, not everyone uses the terminal and so on) or they will hack some basic UI, which takes a significant amount of time and gets thrown away once there is a budget for something permanent.

I build an app called Pagehop (https://pagehopapp.com) and I'm trying to figure out the demand of something I want to add, to remove the pain of the above-mentioned problem. Pagehop is a launcher app you install on your computer, you open it up with a globally assigned key shortcut, you write a query and it displays results and a preview.

I want to build Team Support, which will make it easy to sync scripts (plugins) within a company.

Use-case:

* you are a startup of 10 people; * virtually everyone needs to be able to inspect data from the/a production DB.

If you use Pagehop, you can build a plugin to search your DB. Team Support will allow you to upload the plugin in your team account and it will be synced to all of your teammates. Whenever you need to change the plugin, you just upload the new version to the team account and the rest of your team will instantly get it.

What you get, using this:

* people writing tools for DB (and any web) queries for support/sales/management will be able to push instantly their work to everyone in the team; * everyone will have a UI for looking at DB data; * you will not spend resources building internal websites to-be-thrown-away; * no need to train people to use the terminal.

Pricing:

* I'm currently thinking of charging $10 / month (per seat); * There will be an annual deal discount (-1 month fee) AND an additional discount for teams that show interest now.

Thanks for your time and feedback.

It sounds like what you're looking for is Business Intelligence. There are a couple of cloud tools like Chartio, Tableau, Looker, etc that provide similar functionality.

Thanks, will check these out.

Note: I know the topic isn't on the front page, but am writing this for completeness.

I did check all of these out and as you pointed, they are all BI (Business Intelligence) tools.

What I believe will be easy-enough and useful to do with Pagehop's Team Support is to disperse simpler tools for simple checks into your production data. For example - a support person talking to a customer on the phone (representing the company BigCorp), complaining about being tricked into submitting a payment for a product feature twice. The support guy/gal can open Pagehop with Option + Space and write "pay :company bigcorp" and this would result in a list of all transactions from BigCorp.

Checking activity logs, user data, payment transactions... the list goes on and on. These are all simple queries that don't need a special visualization and almost no customization - you simply need the info, fast. This is where Pagehop shines - it's a launcher, so it's always a shortcut away from you.

Team Support would allow you to disperse these tools to your teammates automatically and keep them in-sync.

And if you are an advanced user - make a recipe to get an SQL/JSON/etc. query and display results. If I build this feature, I am definitely going to provide something default for this.

Coming to think of it - if you have a dashboard in Looker, called "Today's Stats", for example, and lets say you are having a release today - a recipe (plugin) in Pagehop (calling the API of Looker) to show you this dashboard, would be the easiest way to see how you are doing, as often as you like.

Finally, as pretty much everything else, the pricing is also hugely different between these products and what I plan to offer. For a team of 10 you need to spend thousands of $, while you would pay ~ $1k for an annual deal for Pagehop with Team Support.

As mentioned before, this sounds like some BI tools. The collaboration feature set, specifically, is part of jackdb.com it appears.

Thanks for the input. Please see my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028181

JackDB seems like a phpMyAdmin for "every" SQL db with the option of saving snippets - this is far away from what Pagehop does.

Sorry for the formatting - apparently I can't edit the text of the question. These were supposed to be bullets...

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