Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization | Hacker News Reader

Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization

github.com

604 pointsescot84 comments

Hello HN! Nice to see this up here. Chris here, cofounder of Plotly.

Falcon is open source and works without an internet connection or a Plotly Chart Studio account. Falcon wires together our graphing library plotly.js (https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/), the plotly.js chart editor (https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor), Electron, and some open source NPM packages for connecting to databases.

Just FYI - As a company (Plotly), we're spending most of our development effort these days on Dash Open Source (https://github.com/plotly/dash) and Dash Enterprise (https://plotly.com/dash). Truth be told, we found that most companies we worked with preferred to own the analytical backend. We also heard many stories of organizations running into roadblocks with off-the-shelf SQL or BI tools (Falcon included!). Our approach with Dash is to provide the visualization and application primitives so that you could build your own tailor-made dashboards, analytical apps, or yes, even SQL editors.

If you want to read more about where we're at, here's an essay we wrote last week on Dash: https://medium.com/plotly/dash-is-react-for-python-r-and-jul...

I love it. The fact that one tool and with separate tabs you can connect to multiple database is the best feature. Thank you.

Any reason the Github page advertises Windows and Mac but not Linux? I saw that its built in Javascript and checked the releases page,you guys built a Linux version too. Is it just something that, while possible, you don't want to support officially with more than a build?

Just an oversight :)

Thx for your pivottable.js, especially the jupyter notebook extension.

You're welcome! I'm glad you like it :)

I wish I had more time to work on the Jupyter version but Plotly Express and the JupyterLab Chart Editor keep me pretty busy at Plotly these days!

Hi, just wanted to thank you for pivottable.js which I'm using since 6 years ago. I discovered today you're at plotly, I started using dash this year :)

I'm so glad you like it! Have you checked out the upgraded React version? https://react-pivottable.js.org/

There's even a Dash wrapper now: https://community.plotly.com/t/show-and-tell-dash-pivottable...

I'll try it in dash, my other project is still a jquery thing for the foreseeable future :D

ReadMe has been updated with link to the Linux AppImage, now that I'm back at my desk.

Can we login to a remote database through ssh ?

There’s no feature specifically for this but you can sometimes use an SSH tunnel and connect to localhost and have it work out. YMMV :)

I actually like plotly.js, it seems to be one of the only good alternatives to R‘s Shiny library. Still, I prefer to keep JavaScript libraries inside a web browser.

Hey ! I'm a very young engineer working with dash oss, it's a great lib (with plotly) ! Keep the good work

hey Chris

Why would I use dash rather than jupyter notebook with inline plotting?

Feature Request: Chrome Extension

Also see: Apache Superset [0] -- this one looks really like a fully fledged data exploration and visualisation suite, being a possible free and open source alternative to Microsoft Power BI [1]. Using the official / own image can be also deployed as a service running in a local infrastructure.

Would be curious for a comparison between all the mentioned data vis suites in this thread actually.

[0] https://superset.apache.org [1] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Quick comparison:

1) Redash and Falcon focus on people that want to do visualizations on top of SQL

2) Superset, Tableau and PowerBI focus on people that want to do visualizations with a UI

3) Metabase and SeekTable focus on people that want to do quick analysis (they are the closest to an Excel replacement)

I have been using group 2) for 3 something years, I am not too excited by them, Superset is cool, Tableau and PowerBI value has been blown out of proportion by marketing. Group 3) is very promising but for some reason more niche although because of their pricing structure they scale as well as Excel (i.e. you can have thousands of users building stuff in Metabase no problem). Group 1) not sure what to say there, I guess it would be my favorite but SQL becomes messy after the first join.

The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. Without a database, data prep and security setup they are more or less fancy toys. Unfortunately very few companies understand how to set all of this up in a way that users can actually work with it. So I keep seeing a lot of half done, super expensive, setups in Tableau and PowerBI that have not delivered what they were promising.

Also, I agree with chriddyp that most companies would rather own their analytics for stuff that is customer facing. For internal facing dashboards the dashboarding BI tools are OK (although I lean more on group 3) than group 2)).

And there is another Apache project : Apache Hue, as a django web app I d put between group 1) and 2). Not in 3), because there is not "quick charts", and datasources are not managed at application level but in configuration files and require more "administration" tasks.

https://gethue.com/

Curious where you would consider chart.io to fall in this ecosystem?

I have been using it for its seamless AWS Athena integration to get a handle on load balancer logs when needed. However it is pretty pricey. Would love to move to an open source solution. However my use case feels a little different than what was mentioned above?

In theory you are saving some money for not using a database, redshift is also pricey. Have you considered that? The free solution is python + altair in a jupyter notebook, but you would have to decide if it is worth your time to setup.

> The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own.

so true! Only exception is maybe CSV data.

Re SeekTable: it also supports usage scenario when data sources ('cubes') are configured by power user (with some IT background), and shares cubes/reports to others that use simple web UI to create their own reports - and this requires paid subscription for publisher only ($25/mo).

Also see metabase: https://www.metabase.com/

We use this to embed some nice dashboards & run queries to great effect. A very powerful tool!

How does this fair with something like Cluvio?

Metabase is great, I just wish it would support BigQuery properly as currently you need to connect to each dataset individually.

Still, it’s the best OSS software tool I’ve used, I think. Deploy the container to whatever, give it be creds, done.

Is there a recommended tool for BigQuery? Both this and Falcon look great, but my company's pretty wedded to BigQuery for the moment.

All the commercial ones support it, but most of them are expensive. Mode has a free plan which allows you to connect to BQ, run queries and then analyze the result sets in Jupyter. It's pretty cool for smaller stuff https://mode.com/compare-plans/

We used Redash and BQ together at Firebase

Hadn't seen redash, thanks!

SeekTable also can use BigQuery as a data source, however it is more about reports sharing and quick ad-hoc queries - to make this possible data source should be configured first.

Last time we tried to use it there were real problems with date filtering in SQL based DBs and it’s a must for big datasets that span over time (this looks like the most common use case to me). Basically metabase would generate WHERE condition that would like `date(date_column) BETWEEN ... AND ...` (or if you were filtering by minutes or years this would be something else). This prevents DB from being able to use an index on date_column and don’t even get me started on why adding indexes for all sorts of `date(...)`, `year(...)` etc expressions is not an optimal solution. I ended up fixing this in metabase and opened a PR https://github.com/metabase/metabase/pull/9860 Which was initially welcomed but then was ignored for a few months (we were using our forked version in my company in the meantime), after which was closed because they’ve fixed it differently and sure enough they did and it was a neater fix architecture-wise. Just that it didn’t actually fix the majority of use cases so there’s now new isssue opened with the same problem described https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/11502 And surely it’s ignored. Since then we migrated to a relatively simpler Redash, we’ve found that none of the people at our company who were supposed to benefit from GUI query builder never actually used it and only engineers were building dashboards, and for us it’s obviously easier to write SQL. One benefit of Redash I’ve noticed was that it allows you to schedule dashboard queries to run for example every 10 minutes which means that amount of users of the dashboard doesn’t add any load to the DB because they get cached results and those results are relatively fresh at the same time.

It's usually easier to write SQL than drag/drop it. For complex joins having a graphical view of the join structure (list? tree? star?) is very helpful if you're new to it, otherwise no. And drag/drop tools don't cover complex stuff like recursive CTEs, and often, simpler stuff too. IME, YMMV. Maybe better graphical tools exist than the ones I have seen.

I want to find a way to incorporate this into a dashboard for suits. Seems like it would let them solve a lot of their own requests - in theory. In a lot of companies they'd probably still make requests to create the graphs and sql queries for them.

Give a suit a fish and he's happy for a day. Teach a suit to fish and he'll still be back tomorrow for his fish. Who wants to fish when you can get a code monkey to do it for you.

I have experience with this. Give a powerful SQL editor to a suit and find your data integrity borked beyond repair.

Read only?

For this, could probably dump/replicate to SQLite for archive/backup/point in time... Or one-way replicate for reports.

I've used this strategy with a read only replica. It also protects the database from long running and inefficient queries. Highly recommend doing this if you have the budget for it.

This is how PowerBI, from Microsoft, works. It copies the data into local RAM (or on a cloud machine that also runs the dataviz)

This is literally what SSRI and PowerBI was invented for. Still requires codemonkies to prepare the data, but at least it cuts down on the rate of requests by allowing them to massage filters by themselves.

Success here is possible. I didn't believe it until I saw it :)

I was in a regional strategy-esque team for Uber Eats. Eats have a nicely curated data warehouse of core operational data. They also have excellent, free, self-paced SQL training built around that same data (a tailored version of https://academy.vertabelo.com/). So you learn both how SQL works and how your data is structured at the same time. You'd be surprised how many junior-mid level suits are eager to pick this up.

The result is very useful. Some non-technical folk picked this up on the side in just a few weeks. They understood the limitations and caveats needed to use the data well. They needed very limited assistance here-and-there.

It was purely magical how they picked up both the data and the system.

> Give a suit a fish and he's happy for a day. Teach a suit to fish and he'll still be back tomorrow for his fish.

With the exception of a very few competent suits I have known... this is so spot on! Love it! Beautifully put!

Not to be confused with

https://github.com/uwdata/falcon

Another interactive data visualization tool named Falcon.

Both are pretty sweet.

Not to be confused with the API framework for Python.

The list probably goes on.

It's bad naming.

Or the KDE browser

https://www.falkon.org/about/

Or the PHP framework

https://phalcon.io

Or the Marvel superhero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_(comics)

Or the Ruby webserver

https://github.com/socketry/falcon

Or the bird: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon Honestly, who would name a bird after some database software? Shaking head

or the https://www.falcon.io/ social media company

Or the R package for Allele-specific DNA Copy Number Profiling

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/falcon/index.html

falcon heavy has entered the chat

Or the Falcon Enamel Dining Sets https://www.falconenamelware.com/

Or F16 Falcon https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/f-16.html

Or the tracing/logs analysis tool https://github.com/fntneves/falcon

Or the now abandoned Twitter client http://getfalcon.pro/

No, falcons are awesome.

My initial reaction is the same when I see names like these, but...

This happens everywhere in business/products/mom-and-pops even street names in different cities!

Not sure why we’re so sensitive to software names, maybe hits close to home with naming being one of the tough problems along with caching etc (sure everyone knows how the saying goes).

> Not sure why we’re so sensitive to software names

For tools that install in a machine, you can have things be overridden if you install another tool of the same name. Binaries, libraries, or other assets.

Also with abstract things like frameworks the effect is worse, because people are not necessarily sure what you are talking about when mentioning the name. This is not the case usually with street names.

Author of uwdata/falcon here. I'm glad to hear you like the tool we've built.

Not to be confused with the Falcon programming language - http://falconpl.org.

The funny thing to me is always how Oracle is the odd duck, requiring a specific client install to use.. where as most other databases have established protocols with open client library implementations.

Similar to Microsoft's lock-in strategy when they were still the dominant player.

It's almost the opposite of the Microsoft's strategy by then. Microsoft made it easy for anybody to depend on their software, Oracle goes out of their way to make it harder.

We use Oracle at work but I don't use any Oracle clients because you can connect to it use JDBC.

JDBC doesn't require the oracle client software to be installed?

-- edit

Apparently Java is the one platform that Oracle supports without a separate driver install... Though their driver is probably itself written in Java.

This is a cool project - however Mac and Windows only...most likely because they are creating the toolchain for this.

I would pay money to get something like this inside vscode - which is an ecosystem that works great on all platforms and provides the hooks to build something like this.

On that note, I think microsoft is making a mistake by not creating an app store of sorts for vscode. VsCode is as good a desktop developer marketplace as the play store is for mobile apps.

I wish that plotly had built this inside jupyter (where their Dash product competes against Streamlit) or vscode. Building a desktop installer toolchain from scratch, does not make sense.

Apparently it does support Linux as well. At least according to some of other comments here.

It does, I'm running it on Ubuntu.

https://github.com/plotly/falcon/releases

The missing link to the Linux AppImage was an oversight... fixed now that I'm back at my desk :)

And yes, the desktop-app build toolchain is a pain to maintain.

Does anyone know if the visualizations are savable/shareable?

I'd love to stop pasting screenshots in slacj

Hey, looks great! Can't wait to try it out. I wish I could connect to Snowflake.

What command line tools do people use to plot data?

I'd love to be able to write some SQL and pipe to CSV or directly to a tool that will just spit out a PNG or SVG that has the data plotted.

Is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info) the thing for this?

Here's a thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040

There are surprisingly few desktop apps for basic sql -> charts, so I was happy to stumble on Falcon. It's similar to their web offering (or Periscope, Looker, etc) and works quite well (regardless of a few UI quirks).

For those on Rails, do yourself a favor and add this great engine: https://github.com/ankane/blazer

Life-changing!

No Linux?

Yes Linux! It's Electron (which runs on Linux)

Still covering most of the non-HN world.

ReadMe updated to include Linux link!

This looks great! I had never heard of Dash either and it seems it is precisely the tool we need at our startup to do data visualisation.

Awesome work. Will check all this out during the week-end.

I tried but can't connect to any of my databases.

Why not just support odbc/jdbc configurations?

Guys, this should be a solved problem.

Wow, this is great.

Looks great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com