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Comment by samdalton | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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.

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

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