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Comment by n_f | Hacker News Reader

Fabra is built for the modern data stack, meaning our customers already send all of their data to a central data warehouse as their single source of truth.

It looks like Chartbrew connects to various third-party tools directly, which can lead to silos/discrepancies in our experience.

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Chartbrew founder here, just wanted to clarify for readers that Chartbrew doesn't store any data from the 3rd party tools so there's no silo problem. It queries the data sources, computes the data, and stores only the chart configurations.

The only storage Chartbrew does is to cache the data while building a chart so the data source is not queried too many times and the user can see changes quicker. Afterwards, Chartbrew keeps the charts updated with data coming directly from the other tools.

But allowing for integration with multiple data sources doesn't mean you can't use only one if you prefer so. Does Fabra also store the data, or only connects to an external data warehouse?

Exactly! We don't store any data and natively connect to external data warehouses. This means we're way cheaper— no need to move data or store a copy.

I understand, then what's the advantage compared to ChartBrew? Not having the multi-data-source feature doesn't sound like an advantage.

My take is you should always just store any third-party data sources in your data warehouse, where you can then join it with all the other data. Having a feature like this just enables bad practices, and we'd rather be opinionated about how the data stack should look.

Since this is the "best practice" architecture, we've made the decision to focus on integrations with data warehouses specifically— Snowflake, BigQuery, etc. I don't think Chartbrew has these.

Not the OP, but:

Oftentimes data teams have those data sources in the warehouse already (or a process for ETLing new ones in).

Copying data only once means lower costs (maybe) and fewer inconsistencies.

Plus if they’ve done work to join/clean/transform the data in the warehouse they can take advantage of that for product analytics without having to reinvent the wheel in ChartBrew or Mixpanel.

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