Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

Look at my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com). It's a visual replacement for scripted data transformations. People use it to replace SAS and Visual Basic scripting. It also allows creating reusable modules. Contact me at <hnusername>@easymorph.com if it looks interesting to you.

View on HN

Hey, I clicked through, read the tutorial, got excited about your examples.. tried to download and found out it was windows only! I would have totally evaluated it further if there were an os x/linux option.

Thanks for checking it out! As we're targeting Tableau users so eventually we will release an OS X version.

Speaking of Tableau (which was founded on the concept of VizQL), how is this different? Doesn't tableau basically enable knowledge workers to create data-centric web applications?

use a virtual machine or install windows as dual boot.

If this software solves a problem you are really having, nothing would stop you.

if solving one problem involves creating another, it's good to be cautious.

Does this have an API that can be called from .Net?

I'm really liking some of the things Microsoft is doing with Power Query, but I don't like how it is (afaik) only callable from Excel or PowerBI online. I'd like similar capability, but more open, and could be called via scripting, from SQLCLR, etc.

Another big hitch: Microsoft has not published proper API's for manipulating PowerPivot models in Excel, and I don't think they intend to - I've heard one 3rd party has reverse engineered the API's (you can decompile the .Net binaries, but I haven't had the time to look at it yet).

Currently EasyMorph supports integration through command line only. We do not plan having API for the desktop client, but we will definitely make EasyMorph Server API if we reach that point.

Would you perhaps have any info/reference about where I could learn more about this reverse engineered PowerPivot API? This sounds pretty exciting. :D

To expand on my question, I'd heard (from Rob 'PowerPivotPro' Collie, former product manager on the project IIRC) that the core had been written in 'unmanaged code' (probably C++?), so I believe reverse engineering it would be a significantly larger effort than just opening some of its DLLs in say DotPeek, at least from as far as I've been able to tell.

The PowerPivot engine itself I imagine is in unmanaged code, but the code that just writes datasets and whatnot to the model is (from what I've heard)managed code, and indeed you can decmpile the libraries and see all sorts of things, I've only looked around for about 10 minutes or so. And I had just read on some obscure thread that someone had successfully found the undocumented API call to write to the model, which is what I'm wanting to do - but I don't even know what the product name is that supposedly does this, sorry.

Right, makes sense, I'll try and check out what's available then. :)

By writing to the model, you mean programmatically adding new measures or the like?

My interest is in programmatically querying models using DAX, though to this end I'd also look to look in the direction of Microsoft's DirectQuery mode in SQL Server which supposedly did DAX-to-SQL conversion.

If one could use such a conversion plus MDX to start querying models on an Apache Spark cluster through pivot table/chart interfaces...

Not even measures, I'm just wanting to be able to create tables, define relations, etc, with the accompanying sql or m script. I'm hopeful they'll let us do that some day, but I still don't quite believe they've changed their stripes entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com