Databricks acquires Redash | Hacker News Reader

Databricks acquires Redash

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83 pointsakulkarni26 comments

Can’t say enough nice things about redash. It’s become a staple in our data program.

What I’ve found is for our product data, traditional BI tools make certain queries easy but many other queries really hard (Tableau, QuickSight). You end up second guessing the results and checking yourself in SQL anyways.

SQL is the lingua franca of data, and Redash lets us stay in that mindset.

I’ve also been able to submit PR back to Redash with ease, great team. With the acquisition I am a tiny bit concerned about the future, but also hopeful.

Since arikfr is on this thread – thank you so much for Redash. Our internal instance is at query ID 8500+ and everyone on the team relies on it for querying and alerting. Can't wait to see what happens with the resources to take on some of your more ambitious ideas!

recently brought Redash over to my new company, installation was easy and it ran as fast as I remembered. Love low-frills workhorse sql clients like this

What other SQL UIs are people using? There are so many out there: Redash, Metabase, DBeaver, SQLPad, Superset (kinda).

Of the commercial options, I used to use Navicat. Then moved on to DataGrip by Jetbrains.

Of the open/free options, I like DBeaver.

Curious - why DBeaver?

Not the GP, but while the UI leaves something to be desired (it’s Eclipse-based), I’ve found it’s a very productive tool once you figure things out. ER diagrams, graphical ways to update data, extensive ways to export/import data, DB metrics dashboards, lots of useful tools and features.

I've been using Mode Analytics for almost 5 years, and use Metabase or Redash for self hosted solution.

We are using DataGrip and DBeaver to develop any non trivial SQL and investigations.

Metabase we use for building dashboards, and we taught non technical people to use it so they can answer ~70% of questions they have about the data themselves.

If you use DataGrip, make sure you try out the new (to me as an IDEA user, anyway) "Show output results in editor" function.

It's disabled in IDEA by default, so go switch it on and try it.

It's my most recent example of a feature I didn't even know I wanted and now can't imagine not having.

As an added question does any of those free systems support crossfiltering or drill down? Tested them and they seem severely lacking in basic 2020 features their big costly brothers got years years ago.

How does this work?

We went from Periscope to Redash for the cost savings but haven’t missed a thing. It’s fast and has an intuitive UI. I hope it continues on.

I evaluated on-premise Redash as an alternative for engineers and analysts who don't want to learn tableau. It's harder to setup than Metabase but more intuitive to use (for someone with SQL expertise).

However, their feature-set was fairly lacking and the company as a whole seemed directionless.

It's a tough space to be in, and I'm disappointed they couldn't find their footing.

OTOH, I've evaluated Metabase a number of times and never manage to get more than 10 minutes in before running into some staggering flaw that convinces me that I can't put this in front of other people in the business and expect them to use it. I ended up deploying Redash instead - it is unquestionably a much less ambitious project, but it mostly achieves its aims.

Not excited about the “less ambitious project”, but still better than being something that can’t be put in front of people. Glad you found Redash useful. :-)

@arikfr I've learned a lot from redash. Firstly, after knowing redash, I decided to go open-source with my service. I learned a lot from reading redash source-code/repository. Your project is amazing and was inspiration for me! Thank you!

Metabase's indexing really killed our database (SQL Server with dozens of tables, in the low terrabytes) performance. Obviously it's best practice to put that data in either a read replica or in another source, but at the time it wasn't worth the effort for us.

What did you think of Apache Superset?

We (dbhub.io) were looking at the existing Open Source BI tool front ends, trying to see if there are good chart widget sets and or query text box interfaces we could integrate.

Superset was terrible, whereas Metabase seemed pretty easy to use. Ended up just integrating Plotly.js charts though, like Redash, as they seemed more straightfoward. Redash uses them to good effect too. :)

What do you mean by "they couldn't find their footing"?

(I'm Redash founder)

Congrats on the exit btw. Seems like a good fit with Databricks!

It's probably from the perspective that (mostly) any time a smaller player is absorbed into an established one, the smaller player is assumed to not be doing so well.

We installed redash last year. I actually want to compare redash, metabase, & superset.

But installing redash in ec2 is so simple that we just straight use it and forget the alternatives.

As someone looking at Redash to replace Metabase at work, what is it lacking? I’m considering moving to Redash mainly to be able to do cross-DB joins.

Really excited about this.

I evaluated Redash unfortunately it didn’t have as robust a feature set as we needed. I am hopeful that they will continue to develop it and support on-prem deployment a before Mode does anyway.

We changed the URL from https://blog.redash.io/redash-joins-databricks/ to something that isn't a corporate press release.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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