Comment by adeptima | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adeptima | Hacker News Reader

Had a very good experience with Superset.

Superset allowed us to replace Tableau and not looking back

Took me a while figure out how to embed it into my app using Superset Embedded SDK.

Superset Embedded SDK - "Embedded SDK allows you to embed dashboards from Superset into your own app, using your app's authentication. Embedding is done by inserting an iframe, containing a Superset page, into the host application."

https://github.com/apache/superset/tree/master/superset-embe...

Superset is based on very high quality and well maintained chart library eChart

https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/#chart-type-linesG

Community Roadmap

https://github.com/apache/superset/projects?query=is%3Aopen

Huge respect to Preset.io and its team for contributing to the project and keep it in a great shape

https://preset.io/blog/

Superset source code is very easy to read and understand, and as a result it's possible to implement some advanced caching techniques reduce the load on charts.

No BI is perfect.

Watching Superset for years gives me confidence the project will work as supposed down the road, and eventually some of its packages can be reusable for all kind of visualizations and data hacking.

Our main approach to visualisation is to start with eChart and simple Reactjs wrapping and spin off Superset on subdomain for power users, and later see which one works better. Same look gives a very pleasant experience.

We use ECharts in our open source BI tool (Evidence) and it's a great library. Has helped us build a declarative syntax for viz which can be version controlled (https://evidence.dev)

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

Looks great!

Reminds me Obsidian DataView but with charts https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

This whole ideas to have data, visualisations and knowledge base in one private offline place is very appealing

We're fans of Obsidian! DataView looks cool - love the ability to define the tables in code inline in the markdown. That's similar to how we inline DuckDB WASM SQL queries in markdown: https://docs.evidence.dev/core-concepts/queries/

I love Obsidian.

The Markdown <-> Markup typing experience is just so good compared to e.g. Slack, Reddit and other markdown-esque tools

Evidence looks cool, and I evaluated sometime back. The docs says the pages are all pre-rendered for all possible combinations. Is that the case still? If so, if I have a date filter, is it going to pre-render all possible dates?

We recently changed our architecture to include interactivity without having to pre-render all combinations. Pages are still pre-rendered with their initial content, but each Evidence app now ships with filter components and an in-browser DuckDB instance so you can build interactive apps. We call this Universal SQL - if you're interested, we wrote up our rationale for doing this here: https://evidence.dev/blog/why-we-built-usql/

Here's an example project with some filter components and custom styling: https://ecommerce.evidence.app/

This is still a static app - the data warehouse was only hit during the app's build process

How do you deal with data visibility and permissions? I mean, most tables have data that should only be seen by a specific user or group ID, and that layer is usually handled by the application. It would be awesome to expose the power of Superset for users, but I imagine creating the security layer would be a pain.

I have this question too

https://superset.apache.org/docs/security/

You can use row-level security, or specify RBAC with pretty much any SQL query.

eCharts is awesome. We moved from plotly after using it for several months to echarts at https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve and are super happy.

I’d like to see these types of apps start offering SVG embedding of things like graphs. Frames are such a pain.

That's probably not trivial, but it seems plausible. The beauty of open source is that you can help contribute this if you're fired up about it!

Bokeh is an option in the frontend-viz space that puts out pretty solid SVG for statically-rendered charts, while also having the option of more Tableau-like interactive functionality with input fields, dynamic filters, etc. Might be a decent option for you?

Their interactive "embedded-mode" avoids iframes too... but it's built with web components, so you wind up in shadow-DOM hell if you want to do anything dynamic on the view's contents.

I have no experience with Superset. Can you elaborate on a few points where you see it excel beyond Tableau?

I dont want to start a rant against Tableau. It's a powerhouse. It's a great superior software. But when it comes to optimizing cost and comparing the total cost of ownership and opportunity to stop paying for Tableau server license we voted in favor of Superset and mix of Reactjs+Echarts widgets.

https://www.tableau.com/products/server

If you have money, dedicated team of data analytics who are already familiar with Tableau - no need to torture them with other tools.

Honestly it's so hard to compare Tableau and Superset. Tableau has every feature and bell / whistle imagine-able. But it's heavy, desktop oriented, and pricey.

Superset is lightweight and open source, but only has 5% of the features. So it really depends what you need!

Had good results with echarts. With Superset not so much: complicated to install, lost all dashboards after an update, cryptic error messages, custom queries meh: we decided to use views in Postgres. The project with Superset was finished successfully, but the time spend is a multiple compared to using something like Power BI.

All in all, not very innovative, but highly needed open source version of a traditional BI tool. Definitely something to follow and to use in temporary, not too demanding use cases. And hopefully a future replacement of Tableau or Power BI.

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