Sisense Acquires Periscope Data | Hacker News Reader

Sisense Acquires Periscope Data

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Periscope feels a lot like Looker. What are the differences?

The last time I studied it closely was over a year ago, but at that point:

1. Periscope emphasizes directly writing SQL.

2. Looker hides the SQL behind "developer mode" and emphasizes clicking dimensions and measures.

3. Periscope supports R and Python somehow, though I haven't used it.

Yeah, we wound up using both because it’s easy for analysts to use Looker but data devs prefer Periscope for whipping up a graph.

Although... after setting up redash I realized we can get 90% of what periscope offers for free by hosting it ourselves albeit admittedly much less polished. We keep using periscope only because of embeds in our product which redash handles poorly.

We are putting effort in improving our embeds for the next release, and will be happy to learn what you were missing in embeds.

Happy to discuss this further via email (arik at redash.io).

Thanks!

(I'm the creator of Redash, now CEO of Redash the company)

Essentially periscope passes the results of a query back. In python you get it in a pandas dataframe. In R you also get it back as a dataframe. This lets you kinda manipulate how you want... so if you’d rather display using dash or seaborn for example you can (periscope doesn’t have a sankey out of the box so this lets you get around that for example)

I haven't used one of these products yet. Are these analytics platforms able to connect to pull APIs? For ex: situations where you have to query it for data periodically or use webhooks?

Or do you have to upload all the data as CSV/XLS or some other direct data source?

Typically these platforms will query on a data warehouse that you provide: redshift, bigquery, a big postgres instance, or the like.

In terms of getting data into that warehouse, you can write ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts yourself. There are also a number of ETL-as-a-service providers like Stitch or Fivetran that cover common things you might want to sync into your data warehouse and query like salesforce, google analytics, quickbooks, etc: https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/sources/

Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P

I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs. I believe this is designed for much larger companies with integration teams and high-paid help consultants.

Maybe I should build one although I'm sure an app like that exists already somewhere.

I'm not 100% sure if this is a fit for your needs, but Redash[1] (open source, but there is a hosted version too) you can query spreadsheets and APIs (within limits).

Our JSON data source is not merged yet [2], although available already on the hosted version.

You can see details here: https://redash.io/help/data-sources/querying/urls#JSON

[1] https://redash.io/ [2] https://github.com/getredash/redash/pull/3805

(I'm the creator of Redash, now CEO of Redash the company)

This actually looks a lot like something I need. I'll give it a shot.

I agree that these BI tools are not a trivial investment and are not trivial to use, but in defense of building on a SQL data warehouse:

> Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P

> I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs.

The point is that everything speaks SQL, so vendor lock-in becomes much harder and there's no data source that "is not currently in our plans to support" — if you can get the data into the warehouse, it's supported. Definitely a higher barrier to entry for an individual, but I wouldn't do business BI without it.

We've done some insane things, joining across data from 4+ different systems (CRM, email open tracking, analytics, primary app database, email to a blessed account) in ways that would be impossible for an "off the shelf" solution.

There are tools such as Klipfolio and Grow but you're only limited using their UI to build the reports. That's always limiting no matter how flexible their language & UI is and larger companies tend to build their own data-warehouse to be able to query the data using SQL without any limit.

That's why Periscope, Looker and Mode Analytics are quite popular. There are also open-source tools that help you to ingest the data to your database such as Singer.io. Once you have all your data in raw format, you can model your data and power your BI without any limitation.

Periscope is much cheaper.

It’s been a while, but Looker provides LookML, something akin to an ORM for dynamically integrating relations, measures, aggregations, etc. into SQL queries on demand as well as a variety of visualization options for the result set. This is somewhat similar to the architected metadata aspects of SAP Business Objects or Microstrategy. Periscope provides an interface for a developer to manually write a static query and visualize the output similar to Apache Superset. (Cunningham’s Law if this is outdated or otherwise incorrect)

Looker is a lot easier for business users to do simple ad hoc analysis in my experience.

Periscope is easier to turn basic SQL into visualizations and dashboards, Looker requires you to do some extra modeling to get it working.

I've used both, and strongly prefer Looker. But Periscope is likely better for small companies where SQL writers are the only one that really need to do analysis, and does this job pretty well.

But a big congrats to the Periscope team!

Woot woot Harry, Tom and Team!

Congratulations!

Congrats Harry and Tom!

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