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Comment by taylozac85 | Hacker News Reader

Nice post.

Looker (http://looker.com) is an alternative to Periscope that a ton of venture-backed tech companies are using (mostly in conjunction with Redshift). Here are two posts from Buffer and SeatGeek on their stacks using Redshift, Luigi and Looker. Buffer: https://overflow.bufferapp.com/2014/10/31/buffers-new-data-a.... SeatGeek: http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/building-out-the-seatgeek-data...

Looker does not necessitate each member of the team to know SQL to explore the data or create reports. It also has a text-based modeling language that is a thin abstraction layer of SQL. It makes SQL modular and reusable making it far more efficient to support a wide range of analysis. It's more expensive than Periscope, but it's way more powerful.

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Hey Zack, it’s probably a good idea to disclose that you work at Looker if you’re going to talk about them on HN. https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=145490726

I run marketing for Periscope. Like Chartio, you guys have a great product. We routinely send people your way when they have more business user needs and aren’t a good fit for Periscope.

For those evaluating tools like Periscope/Looker/Chartio:

Whereas Looker focuses on business users, we’ve built Periscope around serving SQL analysts better than anyone else.

If you don't have someone who knows SQL on your team, Looker (or Chartio) is probably a better fit. (though I should mention that some customers have learned SQL through our customer support :)

We’re focused on the SQL analysts who are building dashboards and running reports, day in, day out. With that said, every one of our customers has employees who don’t know SQL, but need to dive into their data. So we’ve built a ton of features to make this easy as well.

If you want to find out more, visit https://www.periscope.io. If Periscope looks like a good fit, sign up and we'll get you set up with a free trial.

Periscope question: "Periscope plugs directly into your databases...."

As I understand it, Periscope is cloud based, so could you elaborate on how it might plug into large locally hosted databases, or is the caveat that my databases must also be in the cloud?

(Periscope co-founder here.)

There needs to be a route from the internet to your DB, yes. Sometimes this works because the DB is in the cloud, or sometimes a port or SSH tunnel is opened into a local network.

Ok, so you don't have to physically move you data to the cloud, it can reside locally and just be queried on demand, right?

yep

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