Show HN: Lightdash – An open source Looker alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lightdash – An open source Looker alternative

github.com

34 pointsoliver1015 comments

Hey HN,

We're really excited to release the first public version of Lightdash!

Lightdash is an open source alternative to looker that lets analysts define data transformations and metrics in one place. Lightdash gives analysts a BI platform built on the open-source tools they already love (dbt).

Github: https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash

Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/f3725e98ce4840bda3f719da647f58b0

Install: https://docs.lightdash.com/get-started/setup-the-demo-projec...

We believe that the future of the modern data stack lies in having a single source of truth for all your metrics.

Tools like dbt have made it possible for analysts to manage their transformations using SQL. But existing BI tools still hide away lots of extra business logic, meaning that metrics get scattered across the company (you know those 5 different calculations of revenue XD) and data context gets lost between tools.

With Lightdash, your BI tool is fully integrated with your dbt project. This means:

- You define your metrics right beside the rest of your data transformations, in dbt.

- Developing metrics becomes lightning fast: change some SQL or a metric and immediately see your data viz update

- All your dbt metadata (column and table descriptions, lineage, freshness, test results) is kept in sync with lightdash so you don't have to try to maintain it in multiple places.

Lightdash is still in the early days and we've got lots of work to do. Today, Lightdash supports most popular databases and warehouses but is only tested with PostgreSQL and BigQuery - so, if you try it with another database, it'd be great to hear about your experience using it!

We'd love any feedback or to hear about how you're solving BI at your company today :)

Thanks!

The lightdash team

Well done! I was looking for an open source LookML a while back and found Rakam[0]. It seems they added the dbt layer after the fact while you started with that concept.

Lightdash looks slick, good luck!

By the way, what happened with Hubble?

0 - https://rakam.io/

Thanks! With Hubble, we realised that while some companies wanted a separate tool to monitor data quality (e.g. data governance teams in financial integrations) most modern data teams want to test inside their existing code base (e.g. dbt). Also the majority of the company tends to interact with the data through their BI tool and we think that's where adding data quality makes most sense.

For example: flagging a dashboard as out of date, or showing that a report depends on data with failing tests.

There's rich metadata in the transform layer that just isn't getting pulled through to existing reporting/BI/viz tools.

We still have a lot of love for Hubble and data quality monitoring. By connecting dbt and Lightdash, we finally get some of those data monitoring features we always wanted.

Thanks for sharing Rakam, they always stood out for their choice of using dbt as their transform layer, it's really cool.

Neat. What if we're using dbt Cloud?

We're building support for dbt cloud users right now. Using dbt locally has allowed us to piggy-back on dbt's query runner and we're having to build that ourselves to support dbt cloud.

This should roll out in the next 2 weeks.

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