Show HN: Bdash – A simple business intelligence application | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bdash – A simple business intelligence application

github.com

100 pointsbarlog26 comments

I have been looking for this for the past few days, something to graph directly from my mysql.

Unfortunately the experience in this app is not too good

- The app is just white and it takes a long time to startup, why isn't is just a website?

- Would be nice to just do it on data.

- Clicking CMD+R to run my query for some reason reloads my "native app", this just sucks in all web apps. At the time of writing this post I have done it 6 times in a row.

- My query for 500k rows took 90 seconds, compare this with sequel pro that takes (well it states 373ms) but its spinner were there for like 10s, it shows results instantly though.

- Pressing enter on a 'setup connection' made it save, but not connect. Better to just test the connection at that stage.

- Trying to make a chart and there is no feedback, not sure if it is working and loading, or if I chose wrong values or something like that. But at this stage I'm more likely to close the app than to fix it.

- I like to see my table structure while writing the queries

- Auto complete?

Actually I thought I'd try with LIMIT 100; to see if it were snappier, so I wrote it and pressed CMD+R...

Sorry for the negativity, I reallly want a tool like this, so if this can make it better.

This being said, once I got one chart up and running it is kinda nice and makes me want to continue playing with it a bit.

Try Metabase[0]! It's one of the most professionally maintained OSS projects I've ever seen. For instance, I don't recall seeing design mockups for new features before implementation elsewhere. And it absolutely shows in the app's design.

[0]: http://www.metabase.com/

^second that. Redash [0] is also a pretty nifty tool - and could be used together. [0]: https://redash.io/

Been looking for a tool like that as I have used redash in the past but was not convinced with the whole experience. Besides the setup we had was horrible. Thanks!

Thanks, will check it out.

EDIT: Really impressed with this. It is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for, and it has a fast UI as well.

Thank you for this. This looks really good. Has anyone had experience visualising millions of records in metabase with different users having access to different sections? Basically, I am asking, can this replace SAP Crystal reports?

I've never tried anything SAP, but we do have 10^7 order of magnitude tables in Metabase, and we do use permission groups.

Superset from airbnb might be worth a look: https://github.com/airbnb/superset

Nice! I've been looking for a replacement for wagon since they got acquired.

Looking forward to using this.

How is this compared to an ELK stack? With elasticsearch & (kibana | grafana) you get tonz of functionality with 0 effort...all you have to do is push data to el.

And have an el instance and everything that goes with it...

Nowadays BI has (at least) two sides: visual analytics, and data wrangling. There are many tools aimed at visualization. But there is a lack of tools for easy data wrangling. I have been working on such a data wrangling tool, called Data Commandr, and an early version can be tested here: http://dc.conceptoriented.com

Disappointing click bait.

This is not BI, this is just charting SQL results.

I'd agree it's not a full BI package, but software like "Crystal Reports" is typically part of a BI suite. And while it has more features than this tool, it is also essentially charting SQL results.

Would really love MongoDB support!

A Pandas clone in javascript?

so it doesn't support MsSQL nor Windows ? I think you should work on these two if you want better reach.

>Look, I made A!

Ok, but why isn't it B?

Love this!

Maybe bdash is more advanced with drawing graphs. In our small start-up, we love using blazer: https://github.com/ankane/blazer. Everyone can write queries, we can share it with each other, it has cashing layer for fast results, it provides basic charts, it even has maps representation. Thumbs for the team at Instacart for this OSS product.

For anyone interested in something a little more fleshed out than this, Metabase is open source, works with most ANSI SQL DBs, and provides SQL and non SQL interfaces for data exploration.

Plus it just looks darn nice https://github.com/metabase/metabase. Not affiliated, but we've been testing it at work and it's great for encouraging non analysts to get their hands dirty in data.

This reminds me of a similar project, Redash (https://github.com/getredash/redash), at least in functionality.

This seems like it would be useful for data exploration, and I think the gists are a great way of sharing queries.

Reminds me of https://www.wagonhq.com

Wagon was such a great tool. Shame their acquisition took it away.

Colleagues who used wagon have said good thing about http://datamillapp.com/ - which I guess is trying to be the spiritual successor to Wagon

This is a tasteless chicken. No one would take the effort to use it in real-life business, since there are always better BI software available (Tableau, PowerBI, etc.), with much better user experience (no need to write SQL) and richer and finer plotting features.

I don't see any point in "reinventing" this.

Please don't. It breaks HN's rules to snarkily dismiss new work, especially in Show HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

All new work is vulnerable this way. Sure, most of it won't amount to much, but some will, and we want a culture in which people refrain from trampling on it. Even if you were 100% right in this case, your comment violates the categorical imperative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com