If you are looking for an affordable SaaS alternative, you may want to look into Holistics (www.holistics.io). (Note I'm the other co-founder here with huy)
Besides supporting native SQL, Holistics is designed to address the gaps of SQL for common business reporting use-cases (flexible way of passing user inputs as parameters into report query; supporting if-else capabilities in SQL, reusable query templates and records/columns based access control for users/user groups).
This makes it easier to manage and reduce the management of duplicate SQL query syntax across multiple reports/dashboards (especially multiple UNIONS/Case-Ifs statements). We also have our own DSL for you to configure in more details how certain charts should look like (beyond the normal coloring).
A common problem we also see is that most data-related work is not just visualization, mainly for the reason that most data are not structured/formatted in the right table structure as most companies start off without a data warehouse.
While most query tools requires customers to work with a separate ETL/warehousing tool, we’ve built an integrated approach towards data reporting and data preparation. Insights from our data reporting module (reports with expensive joins, long query times, non-optimal table structures) provides your data analyst inputs to easily move, map records, and transform data without technical engineering knowledge. Data in Google Sheets or CSVs with their data sync automatically (incrementally or full) to their database.
And all this is done with the data not leaving our customers’ database (we don’t warehouse their data. Our data reporting module works directly with your database, and our data preparation module provides just the utilities (not infrastructure) to automate your data pipeline process.
Do take some time to check us out! Quote HN and we give you an additional one day of free trial! :P