Wagon Acquired by Box | Hacker News Reader

Wagon Acquired by Box

wagonhq.com

59 pointsclayallsopp35 comments

Another great and innovative app thrown into the dust from an acquisition. They actually made working with SQL a joy.

Yeah I'm pretty bummed about this. Are there any similar locally-run apps that make it easy to get graphs from your SQL queries? I've seen a few SaaS apps like Periscope that do similar, but I'm not a fan of letting other companies load up our entire database just to make some graphs.

I'm a big fan of Looker[1]. It's one of the best BI tools I've used and it lets you work with SQL but abstracts away much of the minutiae of writing it. It's an enterprise SaaS app, although they do allow you to self host.

For side projects and such I use Metabase[2] which is open source and pretty useful for giving business users access to query data. Its visualizations are rudimentary but workable.

1. https://looker.com

2. https://github.com/metabase/metabase

You might check out Redash or Caravel. They're both open source, you host them yourself, and have a bunch of dashboard and access control functionality.

Caravel in particular has some great exploration tools. You can build queries either by hand or by using visualization specific drag and drop. Caravel is getting regular updates from the AirBnB team too.

If you want more power I recommend using a Jupyter notebook and Python. There's also Rodeo which is like R Studio for Python.

I second Metabase recommendation. Like the fact that it's OSS.

DBvisualizer ... A Java app but it does that job pretty okay.

Yup. Just submitted it to http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Wagon is also interesting for being a Haskell shop. One of the few Haskell start-ups I'm aware of. Super nice bunch of folks.

What I don't get is how dropbox fell behind in this enterprise storage game. Box was a terrible product, buggy UI and all. Dropbox was a joy to use and yet somehow Box seems to be leading in the enterprise market. I don't quite get it.

Enterprise sales! Enterprise is a completely different beast than consumer. Enterprise sales are 60% trust, 20% pricing, and 10% product. The language, practices and culture necessary to do well at selling to large enterprises and all of the differences in the underlying company are so different than consumer products. Enterprise is very misunderstood, even by many VCs!

> Enterprise sales are 60% trust, 20% pricing, and 10% product.

Wow, now I know that's just anecdotal, but that feels about right, and very interesting to have written down. Thanks for that, it's good food for thought.

(Now I'm just wondering what the last 10% is... ;) )

5% steak 5% strippers

inertia

Which begs the question: what are the remaining 10%?

See, these are exactly the kind of questions that will not get you ay enterprise sales ;)

/sarcasm

In 2009 I was running IT for a medium-sized digital agency. I contacted both Box and Dropbox to inquire about paying them a bunch of money if they could give us some more features such oauth/saml auth, and better logging/auditing of our user activity.

Box sales was super responsive, and even got me on the phone to chat with their engineering team about our needs.

Dropbox was completely unresponsive.

Did you ever try anything like https://owncloud.org/ ? I came across it last night browsing random docker containers.

I wouldn't recommend it to replace Dropbox. There are superior open source tools that are specialized for file sync.

Can you recommend any? And something I want to investigate soon.

This didn't exist in 2009.

Count me as another sad user...I started using it towards the end of writing my MS thesis, and was bummed to not know of it sooner. The sharing was definitely a good feature, but the overall experience felt thought out, and was enjoyable!

Question for any users out there - was the valuable part of Wagon the querying/graphing capability, or the sharing part? I've been building a cross-platform desktop app (using Qt) that is basically a SQL querying tool for data analysts instead of developers (with a focus on analyzing data instead of being able to modify data). I've been trying to figure out how to price it and was a bit discouraged when I found Wagon (how do you compete with free)? Also it's tougher to do sharing of interactive charts with a desktop product (although I have ideas for being able to post static annotated charts into slack or other popular SAAS products).

Huge Wagon fan. Very sad to see it go. I loved both the sharing functionality (shared folders + being able to easily share a link) and graphing capabilities. If I had to pick one over the other I'd probably pick the graphing capabilities.

Would love for you to replicate Wagon :)

I'd be happy to pay $5-10 / month to continue to use Wagon past October

Competing with free is really easy when things like this happen.

There is a simple question to determine your relationship to a company or product, are you the customer or the product. Did you pay for it?

If no, you're the product and they can arbitrarily change the rules of the game.

If yes, yay you.

what is wagon?

It used to be (or still is inside Box?) an analytics startup [1][2][3].

EDIT: Their Twitter account also gives a little bit of information: Wagon is a modern SQL editor. A better way for analysts and engineers to write queries, visualize results, and share data & charts [4].

[1] https://www.wagonhq.com/about

[2] https://www.wagonhq.com/blog/engineering-at-wagon/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/37jwip/a/

[4] https://twitter.com/WagonHQ

It is(was) a company and its main product was a SQL client with built-in visualizations and features to save queries (just the query not the RS) in their cloud and share these queries with others peers in your organization. In my opinion it was a very good product... Sad that they didn't open sourced it. =/

Happy for the team at Wagon, but sad to see this. Was actually starting to enjoy using Wagon as a SQL client.

This was inevitable, though - the Wagon team didn't seem too concerned about trying to find a way to monetize the app.

I was waiting for their Linux client.. I liked the charts and the feature to export them, anyway it was an awesome app with a great UX, really sad to see that go.

I found out about wagon 2 hours ago and was playing with it a bit today.

For me, that was very short lived, but their application did actually seem nice. What a bummer.

Is Textur (https://www.textur.com/) an alternative to Wagon?

Was a great product and team

Indeed. They got $2M in funding - must have run out of money and not been able to secure follow-up funding. Unfortunate.

Congrats WagonHQ folks!

periscope data is great for sql visualizations. Way faster than any in house open source database plus priced affordably for any company larger than 10 people.

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