Mode Studio – Python, R and SQL Editor | Hacker News Reader

Mode Studio – Python, R and SQL Editor

blog.modeanalytics.com

On a related note, Mode's SQL tutorial is the best comprehensive introduction to the language that I've come across. If you go through all of it you can get from zero knowledge to 95% of the SQL skills you'll need as a data analyst.

https://community.modeanalytics.com/sql/tutorial/introductio...

What’s the remaining 5%

Workarounds due to workplace-specific problems with your data...you'll learn that on the job :)

In my experience that's a lot closer to 50%.

SQL is easy, Data is hard.

This can't be overstated enough. Finding people who understand SQL is difficult enough, but finding people who intuitively "get" data is nearly impossible. And lately anyone who completed a few tensorflow tutorials thinks they're a Data Scientist and every single data question can be answered accordingly. Reminds me of the hadoop craze a decade ago.

Hadoop craze was a decade ago? Damn...

I am trying to learn intermediate to advanced SQL as my employer wants me to but apart from the the most basic keywords I don't see a lot of difference between Basic to Intermediate SQL. Or maybe by intermediate it means designing a good data model which shouldn't be concerned with SQL. My question is, if someone asks me to learn the advanced SQL constructs, where do I go? What do I look for?

https://community.modeanalytics.com/sql/tutorial/sql-data-ty...

I found that the book SQL Antipatterns helped me figure out some advanced SQL constructs. It presents a problem, shows the naive solution, takes apart that solution, and shows a better way.

Database Design for Mere Mortals by Ray Hernandez. Best book I've found to give a running start.

Explain the difference between INNER join and LEFT join, when you can do that you know intermediate to advanced SQL.

Impressive tutorial! their advanced level tutorial is pretty awesome and helps someone who wants to brush up SQL skills before having analyst interviews. They even have Python tutorial too which I want to try as well.

If you're looking for something free, open source, selfhosted, or doesn't require programming knowledge (but allows SQL if needed), there's Metabase: https://metabase.com/

Disclaimer: I work on Metabase

We use Metabase at Delibr and we love it!

We use metabase too! Far superior to Mode with no cost!

What are some things you like in Metabase better?

Metabase is great but try as I might, I cannot get it to connect to a Postgres database over SSL. So... I'm using Redash instead, where it was easier to make that happen.

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/6435#issuecommen...

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/6095

just noticed it is written in clojure, always nice to see clojure (or F#) used

Thank you for your work! Metabase has been a tremendous help in getting my coworkers interested in data and analytics, and is probably the sole reason why our call center is finally registering data in a structured and organized way.

This blog post asserts that Mode Studio supports R Notebooks. It's worth noting that these don't appear to have anything to do with the R Notebooks that you get in RStudio[0].

They appear to be identical to its Python notebooks except for the language, like running a Jupyter with an R kernel.

[0] https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/r_notebooks.html

Somewhat related, but I absolutely love Mode. In a previous role my team used it extensively - by far the easiest tool of its kind I've used. Great support too.

Can't recommend their tutorials enough, to echo another here they really cover everything you need to get started

After quickly skimming the terms of service[0]. Do I understand correctly that in the free version, all your content has to be public?

I'm not against that model (actually like it), but it isn't at all clear to me from the blog post or the main page.

[0]: https://about.modeanalytics.com/tos/ under "4. Financial Terms"

"The public function is available free of charge for public use and allows you only to view information other Mode users disclose using the public function. When you use the public function, you may disclose or upload Your Content using only the public function. "

Hey! I'm Mode's CEO. We host a database that contains all the data for tutorials. You can also upload CSVs to this database and do analysis to share with others, but the data and analysis are publicly visible. This is a feature we have had for awhile.

The paragraph below the one you cited says "The private function is available in two versions: (i) free of charge (with limited functionality) and (ii) as a premium paid Service (“Premium Service”)." This is the thing that's new today -- you can now work with private data for free.

Sorry for the confusion.

That's a really interesting approach. Give away the platform to get everyone's data for free. Like GitHub for data.

Nobody at Mode will ever look at data in your database without express written permission. Period.

Maybe I misunderstand, if you are a free user the data has to be public right? And any user can use the public data?

Regardless of whether you are on a free or paid account, you have two options:

-Public: Upload data or use data that is already in a database that Mode hosts. All data and analysis done here is visible to anyone. This is most commonly used with the SQL tutorials that others have posted about here.

-Private: Connect your database to Mode and do analysis on your own data. This is only visible to people you add to your Mode Organization. In fact, making your private data accessible to people outside your Organization is a paid feature and comes with more granular permission controls.

We have tried to make this as clear as possible in the product and ToS, but looks like we missed on the latter. We will revise to make it clearer.

None of these platforms "get" your data other than running the queries in your databases and displaying the results (and sometimes caching it for future lookups).

I couldn't tell from the landing page whether this is a desktop app, or whether it runs in a browser. Could be interesting if it is a desktop app.

But free! Which is great for people that just want to mess with data analytics.

It runs in your browser which is key to allowing people across the organization easy access to data. Its great! I was one of their early customers and I still use it most days.

Yeah because people haven't been able to share data before browser based editors...

I adore Mode - i find it the best SQL editor and dashboard by a huge margin. I mostly just use it as a SQL editor and then there’s an amazing ability to turn that SQL into exceptionally useful dashboards.

I can see the use case of this being similar to having Excel connected to an SQL server and creating some pivot charts off of the connection. Then rather than emailing the Excel file (which might be quite large depending on how much data is pulled into Excel), emailing a URL which is much cleaner.

Am I correct in thinking that Mode is not really a reporting platform (e.g., QlikView, Power BI) and more of an investigative, analytics-sharing tool?

Yes, it's more exploratory and lower-level. It can do the usual "dashboard" style reports but its closer to Juypter notebooks and allows you to run python + sql (+ R now) and even edit the HTML to make your own visualizations.

Similar to https://exploratory.io/

This look amazing, and the WYSIWYG editor mode is what R Markdown notebooks (in RStudio) are missing right now.

However, there seems to be no way of uploading a private .csv? I need to make it public OR allow access to my company database (, which is simply not going to happen unless you have an on-premises solution)?

I have to sign up to see this in action? No video demo or anything? I don't even know if this is a software where you download or if it's a web service cloud thing.

I think this is such a bad way to announce a product. Or lazy way.

I'll stick to Rstudio and Rodeo.

I've been trying my hand at something similar. It's not nearly as finished as mode is though.

https://github.com/Jungle-Works/AllSpark

Mode is a great tool for running a query and executing some code afterwards and even distributing that report to others. However, its important to keep in mind that it doesn't have any real organizational tools which limit its use case. There are no tools for versioning and sharing notebooks (there is actually a shared query feature that is available at extra cost) and code (and you can only run the versions of code they have installed), or modeling your data and report parameterization is very difficult. Also, (perhaps due to being solely browser based) there can be issues working with larger data sets.

Where is the data housed? Mode servers?

for the free version, seems like it.

Mode doesn’t do any private data warehousing, it just connects to your own hosted data

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