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Comment by mmckelvy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. I fully agree that a combination of spreadsheets and SQL are the ideal tools for data analysis -- not a SaaS GUI.

> Niching down, if you work in operations at a <50 person startup or SMB and your company relies on a Postgres or MySQL database, Sourcetable is an affordable reporting tool with turnkey data infrastructure that doesn’t require code or engineers to set up.

With the rise of AI, companies like Tembo that help you set up all in one databases, and tools like this, I'm increasingly of the mind that many companies should start bringing things like analytics and observability in-house. I don't see the need to pay Mixpanel or Datadog thousands of dollars per month when a self-serve solution that relies on tried and true tech is more or less at your fingertips.

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Minus the AI part tools like this have existed for decades.

And companies are not dumping their SaaS tools and switching to them en masse.

Because (a) data silos have dramatically increased pushing dreams of a unified data schema out of reach, (b) technology stacks have become far more complex necessitating tools like Datadog and (c) competition is stronger than ever meaning that skimping on paying for tools like MixPanel is often short sighted and counter productive.

Companies like this will do fine and there will be always be a demand for them especially in the SMB space. But there simply isn't the business value in bringing a lot of analytics and observability in-house in almost all cases.

Not yet. But in the analytics case, suppose you could build a tool that collected data on your own infrastructure, allowed you to write plain SQL against a PostgreSQL database to get whatever analytics data you need, had an AI-driven text-to-SQL option so non-technical users could get whatever analytics data _they_ need, and output everything to a universal interface, i.e. a spreadsheet? No vendor flavored DSL, GUI, or workflows to learn. That product would be tough to beat. It wasn't built in the past because it was hard. But with AI and something like Tembo or Timescale, is it actually hard anymore?

Managed services are useful.

Agree. A general thesis I have is that the API-ification of the web fragmented business information, and with every new SaaS tool we fragment our company's data further. The trend at all company sizes is to be increasingly analytical, but for SMBs it's too hard to get access to your data (mainly due to technical limitations). So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere, and we think that somewhere is inside the data tool that everyone actually uses: the spreadsheet.

Many other advantages of this data centralization too. Data + spreadsheets + compute is a nice application base for agents.

> So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere

Modelling and integrating datasets that you don't own is extremely hard.

Shopify for example updates their API every 3 months.

How much time and money do you think an SMB can afford to spend on this before the ROI becomes so poor that they abandon it entirely.

There is a separate answer here which is many (most?) SMBs can't afford technical folk, so the ability integrate data at all, talk to it and model it (using SQL or AI), is already a big step forward for them.

My personal use case tends to involve a lot of Postgres data and transaction events for my reporting. We see "simple" businesses like parts manufacturers, print shops, vineyards, etc. all doing something similar.

Yes some integrations are excellent (hey Stripe : ), some are terrible (no comment on who). We're finding that LLMs increasingly able to fill the gap around organizing data schema for that initial data prep piece where someone has to build the data tables that others consume. To your specific question/problem set, when a schema updates you end up with a "fuzzy schema matching problem"; we are solving that separately anyways for a separate product feature requirement.

Strong note here that the current state of technology is much better for SMB scale data and not enterprise scale data with messy schemas.

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