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Comment by Maarius | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I'm Marius, one of the founders of Cluvio.

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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The market for data visualization tools is crowded and has gotten very competitive in the past year. Specifically, how does Cluvio compare to Microsoft PowerBI? That also (already) has support for R, supports many more data sources, seems to be more polished/mature, and is a lot less expensive, it even has a free desktop version.

I was curious and hadn't heard about PowerBI before, so I checked the site just now.

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.

You should read a bit further, I think only your last assumption is correct: there is indeed no desktop client for Mac, so you have to use Windows to design dashboards/reports. There are web, native windows, android and ios interactive report viewers. With a single paid license you can publish to the cloud and make reports available to anyone, even embed it in a website or app. There's even a Redshift connector in preview.

Product looks pretty cool. I'm curious as to what the limitations of the R integration are though. Do you allow for different packages to be installed or is that something your team manages?

Hi there, Ian here, the other founder of Cluvio.

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.

Looks cool. But what connects to my database? I think you could explain that a bit more on your site.

Right, this would benefit from being a bit clearer.

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).

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