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Comment by MechanicalTwerk | Hacker News Reader

Wish you the best of luck but isn't this just a fancier version of EAV?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...

IMO, it doesn't matter what kind of db technology, schema or query tool that you use. A company will always have analysis sprawl regardless of whether those analyses are represented as data lake files, sql tabes, materialized views, regular views, or (as is often the case with EAV and other such schemas) queries saved in some BI tool. There is no silver bullet and it will always take some work to maintain single source of truth, traceability, a coherent model that is understandable by average business users, etc.

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Yeah, Entity modeling was one of the big inspirations to our approach. The main difference is how do you reassemble the single time-series table to create any table.

This was quite a challenge and I think what makes the traceability and source of truth problem a lot simpler.

In Narrator, the data team writes small SQL to create single customer centric business concepts that we call activities. These are around 25 lines and decided to be understood by anyone in the company (i.e. "viewed page", "called us",...).

Now, every question you or a stakeholder has will simply be a rearrangement of these activities. If you can describe what you want, then Narrator can assemble a table that represent it.

Source of truth - What ever is in the activity stream? Tracebility - always Dataset (activities and how they relate), then activities (~25 SQL). Coherent Model - Customers doing actions in time.

Does that make sense? Some of these things are easier to show in a demo then describe in text.

> activities and how they relate

This is the problem with EAV/nosql/schemaless/etc and ultimately the problem I think you are going to have to solve. Instead of using ETL to model how the activities relate and reifying that model as database objects, EAV just kicks the can down the road to the query/BI tool.

Sprawl - The BI tool will end up containing most of the real business logic sprawled across many reports.

Single source of truth - A lot of the reports will be very similar but they will be based off slightly different activities or slightly different filtering logic. Which report is the correct one?

Traceability - I think this is more of an end-to-end "garbage-in, garbage-out" problem that all ETL/BI tools have that wouldn't be specific to your tool. It's more of an organizational/people problem.

Coherent model - In my experience, EAV isn't enough to cover the breadth of analyses mature businesses need to do and most business users won't be able to wrap their head around it. There will have to be some data person that creates a more coherent, tabular/spreadsheet-like model and in the case of this tool it looks like that model will have to exist in the BI tool. Which brings us back to sprawl/single source of truth issues.

Just some thoughts. But always glad to see more people working on stuff like this!

Edit - one last thing I wanted to mention. I think in reality you are going to find it takes more than ~25 lines of sql to define activities. That may be the case if the source is a schema that gets spit out of something like Stitch, but many other schemas in the wild will take a lot more than 25 loc to massage into your 11 column schema.

Sprawl - YES! I would never put a single time-series table in your BI tool. It is not queryable and you will hate the insane results.

- We actually built our own query layer called Dataset to make sure that the dataset is materialized. This way if you put it in your BI tool, you can always go back to the dataset which points direct to the activity stream.

Single Source of truth. & traceability - 100%. We really aim to have activities be actually different. Each activity is modeled via SQL and often done by a data engineer or analyst. You cannot just create 1000 activities. 90% of our customers have between 20-40. This enables your activities to be unique. Also unlike tables, activities are building block so they map to something real (i.e. "paid invoice", "sent contract").

So far we haven't seen many people struggling with activities being too similar.

Also the modeling of the activity helps clear up the Garbage in -> Garbage out problem that often happens with CDPs (mixpanel, segment, etc..).

In terms of analysis. We did build a tool called Narrative (actionable analysis in a story format). This is designed to get users to write their analysis with CONTEXt built in vs just numbers on a screen. With context + the ability to click to see the activities and relationship people can quickly know what data powers the source. Does this solve the problem 100%? Nope, but it does take us huge steps in the right direction.

Coherent Model - I think our tool Dataset helps with this problem. We started as a consultancy and answered 1000s of questions over 3 years till our tool was able to answer any question. I usually demo by asking the customer to ask any question they have and I try to answer it live. So far, we have been able to answer them all so I am SUPER excited to find the limit of our tools.

Yeah, for data EL via Stitch, Fivetran then this is easy. Dirty data that is a bunch of JSONS etc... take a bit more effort but that building of the activity is done once. You also don't have to deal with how concepts relate or identity resolution or a lot of other things that make SQL complex.

Overall, I love this conversation and would like to continue. I am excited to hear some of your edge cases. Maybe we can even setup some time and talk face to face: https://calendly.com/ahmed-narrator/30min-1

I took a deeper look at the Dataset portion of your product this morning and it definitely piqued my interest. It wasn't clear to me from your original post and my initial scan of your site that there was a way to create queries/models/views (whatever folks want to call them, they're essentially the same concept) on top of the single activity table and then either materialize them or integrate them with other services via webhooks or native API integrations. That's definitely super useful. Also, the "Relationship" concept does a nice job of trying to approach joins/window functions in plain english. Query builders are always a difficult UX problem and I think you're onto something interesting. Finally, the validation, identity resolution and spend features are also nice and I could see you adding value via more features in this vein in the future.

The main thing this product strikes me as is "The ETL tool that understands your business". Whereas the domain language of most ETL tools is at the level of DW technologies (rows, columns, schemas, facts, dimensions, indexes, join algos, views, dags, orchestration schedules), the domain language of Narrator is at the level of the business (activities, customers, relationships, spend, etc). In a way it's sort of similar to the old convention over configuration religious war. I could see companies using Narrator for the 80% of ETL that is just plain table stakes in order to compete nowadays and offloading most of the definition and minor customization of this ETL to less technical folks. And maybe in parallel the data engineers would use plain old code to do the last 20% of ETL that is truly proprietary and specific to the business.

Not sure if my biased initial reading of your pitch was off but it seemed like you were focusing heavily on addressing the pain points of the star schema. I've found that most people fall into two camps: either they don't care at all about the kimball star schema world and they're just loading tables however they see fit into their warehouse or they are willing to go to their grave defending the star schema and its variants. In either case, I don't think you gain much by positioning yourself as the antidote to the star schema. I think you could capture customers in both camps by focusing instead on the fact that your ETL tool has a deep understanding of how companies that rely heavily on a web presence work. I think this would also better align you with the ability to increase your customers' revenue as opposed to optimizing engineering/infrastructure concerns which is an easier sell.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I'm going to shoot you a short email in case you want to connect.

That is really great to hear! I think you make a great point and we will discuss your recommendations internally to improve our messaging.

I am excited to chat in person.

EAV [...] my thoughts exactly. My last encounter with EAV was briefly said disastrous.

On the other hand, HW gets better and better, and if you are able to do on the fly, what used to be a "cached" entity, then there you go.

Yeah our first iteration of the activity stream was at WeWork and it was impossible to use. For this reason we built our Dataset tool and thanks to our innovation of relationships we are now able to make use of this structure to create any table.

Often, people think that just creating a time-series table is enough but it is so hard to use and so hard to maintain that you will hate yourself. Narrator solve all those problems so your experience become truly incredible!

"EAV has three columns, and these go to eleven"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW008FcKr3Q

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