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Comment by bijection | Hacker News Reader

Co-creator here! We wanted

  * A simple, flexible SQL client
  * A notebook interface that lets you drag stuff around and view things side-by-side
  * Query CSVs, JSON, and XLSX documents fully in-browser with Emscripten + SQLite
  * Postgres, MySQL and BigQuery through a local connection bridge. Your data never touches a third party server.

I’ll be here with @antimatter15 for the rest of the morning answering questions!

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This is really cool :) I nearly worked on such a project myself, out of frustration for simple solutions. I've seen similar things recently with SQL Notebook, Zeppelin, Jupyter, Flyspeed SQL query.. and more complex desktop apps like Tableau, QlikView, etc. I kept thinking to myself... why isn't there just a lighter weight query only tool. It helps people to learn, it's a handy utility, it helps you just use SQL as a utility for quick tasks using a UI - very nice.

A few questions/comments:

- Are you planning to put this in an Electron app? I think the more you can make it feel like an actual desktop app, the more likely you are to get more "regular" users. Just my opinion.

- While I love the simplicity of making this sound like a cloud service, I think that the nature of it being provided through the user's own infrastructure should be emphasized even more. As far as I can tell (and I haven't looked extensively), there is nothing that is actually "cloud oriented" about your service. Is it because people make there own "cloud" out of your bridge adapter? For people who want these tools on-premise and under their own control, you have a solution.

We've got an Electron app in the works. Check out the Github repo if you're interested in helping out!

Yeah the domain name is pretty much a complete misnomer (it was a cheap gTLD :/).

I fell in love w/ a fantastic little CLI util called 'lnav' which has an embedded sqlite db and lets you do all kinds of querying (eg write SQL queries against a few million rows of server logs in a custom log format, or use regex to transform files to/from arbitrary formats...). http://lnav.org

It's sort of a mini ETL powertool.

Thank you so much for your great work! This is exactly the kind of post I visit HN for!

Hello! This is a great product, I gave it a spin in a local setup with some actual production data. I'll compare it to Metabase (even though you aren't trying to do the same thing).

* I really like the editor. It beats metabases ACE editor anyday.

* Here's the line graph comparison between the two: https://imgur.com/a/gd5P8 I think that metabase wins here because I can get more information off that graph rather than an area under the graph kinda thing that Franchise is trying to do. Is it configurable somewhere?

* Can I link other users to the question somehow?

If you press the "Download" button, you can download the document as an HTML file. Share it through email or any other means, and it'll open in the Franchise web app— with all the queries, the results, and visualizations.

Can you query an elasticsearch instance in this way? i.e. as an alternative/complement to kibana?

This looks great! Is there any chance that it will work with MS SQL Server? Sadly (i.e. over my recommendations) my company uses it rather than PostgreSQL.

Great work. Love the name too, tickled me when I read the strapline

Hi,

Any plan to support jdbc so that it’s possible to connect to things such is HiveServer2/SparkSql?

same here - actually, today we use zeppelin, which is kind of a pain to setup on a cluster.

I see that you are using Reactjs. If you can build something that can connect to spark and python, I will pay for this and so will lots of people.

One of the big unsolved issues where we want to really throw money is have a notebook that my analysts can work on and then I can take straight to production and have it run multi-user.

There are lots of startups attempting to do this on top of Jupyter, but I believe building this from scratch is the right way.

I'm literally crying right now for a reactjs + d3js dashboard running on pyspark that multiple people can use simultaneously.

We're hoping to add support, ideally with the help of the open source community! You can follow along at https://github.com/HVF/franchise/issues/5

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