Show HN: Cluvio – A new cloud analytics platform based on SQL and R
cluvio.com
cluvio.com
Cluvio allows you to run SQL queries against your database, visualize the results as beautiful dashboards and share these dashboards within your company.
We have integrated an R engine in the pipeline, so you can run custom R script on the sql results to get combined power of SQL and R.
After working on Cluvio for 18 months, we launch today and would love to hear your feedback.
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There are some limitations to the R execution environment, as you correctly expect, as a result of running custom code in the hosted environment.
Our use case for R is to provide additional expressivity for things that are harder to do in SQL and very easy in R, as part of the data pipeline. We do not allow to run some system calls and do not allow to install additional packages.
Having said that, we do currently include some good basis with plyr, dplyr, reshape, and more will be added based on demand.
Our backend query execution service connects to the customer's own DB as a client. The connection can be secured via SSH tunnel and firewall rules (for our NAT gateway IP addresses) - that way the database would never have to be exposed to the internet (as it never should be).
Some obvious differences: PowerBI is priced per user, so it can get expensive fast (assuming you need the pro features). Also, there doesn't appear to be a cloud version of PowerBI so you'd be managing it yourself. PowerBI doesn't support AWS Redshift or Aurora. And unless I'm mistaken, PowerBI desktop is Windows-only.
I'd say Cluvio would be a bit more fun to use for anyone who knows SQL, the ability to quickly iterate through sql queries to nail down the exact results is quite addictive. Plus the additional capabilities of R make it even more productive for lots of harder cases.
There are more differences in the visualisation capabilities, user experience and pricing (esp. with larger number of business users that should make use of the analytics results, which are free in our case).
I looked at the demo video, it didn’t appear to allow embedding of anything that R would output but rather just appended data that was manipulated within R back to the output of the original query.
Mode has python notebook integrated and can read in your queries as datasets and then embed whatever you render from python. You cannot modify the original data of the query within the python notebook and then use mode's stock visualizations from the data you created in python.
This is a pretty big difference between the two if I'm understanding it correctly.
The GUI/Dashboarding of this looks way better than mode.
I'm curious how Cluvio supports filters such as drop down menus, filters based on dynamic queries (vs. hardcoded), and supporting drop down filters with multi select. (Mode does these things very poorly, chartio does them pretty well).
Re: the R output - for us the R script is an optional step on the data pipeline, it can be either of these 2:
SQL Query -> (data table) -> visualisation SQL Query -> (data table) -> R script -> (data table) -> visualisation
i.e. the R step is injected, takes data as input and produces data (in the form of data.frame, vector of values or primitive values) as output.
Re: the filters. We support time-based filters very well with a nice UI (custom time ranges, time ranges relative to today, additional comparison time range). Custom value filters are currently in beta and once launched (in couple weeks) will support multi-select as well as values based on dynamic queries.