Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
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github.com
ankane is a true wizard; dude has written so many other fabulous tools like searchkick & chartkick.
I’ve created a feature where you can share CSVs from a clip and import the data into Google sheets. There is a PR for this on the repo.
I’ve also created cron job monitoring with it. You can read up about that here: https://abuisman.com/posts/developer-tools/cron-monitoring-w...
Andrew Kane’s gems are a gold mine. Ahoy is another great one and he also created pgvector. Humbling amount of work.
The only downside is that, by virtue of its simplicity, it's not well-suited to fine-grained access controls or other similar compliance concerns. In fact, those concerns have fomented maybe three serious attempts at my job to remove Blazer and replace it with $BI_TOOL_DU_JOUR. Each time, these massively-funded vendor tools just abjectly failed to do what Blazer does, and each have been phased out. Blazer is undefeated :)
When I start a company, Blazer will be one of the first bits of infrastructure I stand up.
anyway, same as you said, blazer was in constant threat of being "phased out". It's a hollow wish by the powers that be. blazer is too useful.
I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project.
If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.
1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users)
2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead
3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod
4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all the data there
5. Queries were timing out against Snowflake in Blazer (never figured out the problem here, maybe the ruby gem for Snowflake was buggy?)
6. Set up Metabase instead, which worked fine, but non-technical people could never really use it.
(note: I'm a founder, shameless plug below)
This felt like a lot of work. I just wanted a place to dump all my data and easily create reports. Bonus points if non-technical people could do the same. That's what we're going for with Definite (https://www.definite.app/)
1. Built-in data warehouse - We spin up a duckdb database for you
2. 500+ connectors (e.g. Postgres, Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc.) - You don't need to buy a separate ETL, it's also built-in
3. Semantic layer - Define dimensions, measures, and joins using SQL in one place. We have pre-built models for all the sources we support (e.g. the Stripe model already has measures for MRR, churn, etc.)
4. Simple BI - Build a table with the data you want and generate visuals off that table. Works like a pivot table, if you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Definite.
I'm mike@definite.app if anyone wants help getting set up.
I've been trying to retire metabase but our non technical people love it too much. everyone from marketing to finance has dashboards and alerts and reports.
What were you looking to replace it with?
But the lack of all of these features is what I absolutely love about Heroku Dataclips and products inspired by it. It does "run SQL on my DB and give me a shareable chart" more easily and effectively than any BI tool I've ever used.
It's such an incredible mini-product that made Heroku Postgres a joy to use (when I used to use Heroku), and what makes me excited about something like Blazer.
I think that's my main issue with tools like this.
- Heroku was my first experience deploying a website: `git push heroku master`
- Dataclips was my first experience writing SQL
Writing code was markedly better than building dashboards in Tableau, which inspired Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - an open-source SSG for creating data websites using SQL and markdown, which I'm now working on
Previous HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
We also use Tableu for more sophisticated reports for non-technical users, but since blazer is just a Ruby gem, there’s almost no reason not to have it set up in a rails app.
After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.
In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.
[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase [1]: https://docs.render.com/deploy-metabase
[1] https://github.com/ankane/blazer/blob/bd06aab33052783e84672b...
[2] https://blog.saeloun.com/2019/10/28/bind-parameters-in-activ...
The rate limits on most API's like that normally prevent analytical queries. e.g. if you wanted to query all your open deals in Hubspot, it could take several minutes to run the API requests to get the data.
This is normally solved with ETL into a database instead.
The ETL approach makes sense but in the case of a service/microservice but I'm assuming you've got to have a well defined dataflow.
Edit: also at that point, any change (schema change, etc.) to the underlying data store represents a change to your dashboard, rather than a change to an API.
However, I’ve contributed a couple of PRs and heard crickets. Doesn’t seem as if the repo is maintained actively these days, so we run a modified fork internally.