[HN Gopher] Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
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Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
Author : tosh
Score : 151 points
Date : 2024-02-27 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| voberoi wrote:
| It's open-source Heroku Dataclips (one of my favorite products
| ever)!
|
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what
| happened to me:
|
| 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.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| > Set up Metabase instead but...
|
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Did they create the dashboards though? The problem I had is
| every time they wanted some small change, they needed to
| bother someone that knew SQL and they couldn't create one
| from scratch.
|
| What were you looking to replace it with?
| MattJ100 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's the motivation behind retiring
| metabase? (especially if people love it as you say)
| joeconway wrote:
| This is one of the better landing pages for a product I've
| seen, it's so succinct. Nicely done. I'm going to actually
| evaluate your product today as a result
| apercu wrote:
| Nice, clear, concise demo.
| voberoi wrote:
| I know the market you are targeting with your product plug
| and the problems you point out are real challenges that
| businesses have.
|
| 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.
| kak3a wrote:
| How are those 500+ data source connectors are implemented? Do
| you use 3rd party APIs? Im always curious about that.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Great question. We're using Meltano
| (https://hub.meltano.com/extractors), so no third party (we
| host the meltano jobs on our infra for you).
| archiewood wrote:
| Was very bummed out when Heroku started charging for Hobby Tier
| as I had to sunset a few of my hobby apps
|
| - 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)
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| I use Blazer every day, just as a convenient way to run SQL
| against a read-only instance of our production database.
|
| 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.
| Rafert wrote:
| We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a
| quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business
| intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is
| limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in
| an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no
| customizability at all.
|
| 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
| netcraft wrote:
| I have built several things like this over the years, and used
| other similar products like redash and metabase. This looks
| really nice, and has a lot of potential. Lots of nice features
| like "this is part of a dashboard, be careful when editing". Def
| bookmarked.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Why no REST API data source?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Like to query data from SaaS apps? e.g. Hubspot?
|
| 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.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Sure, or any internal service/microservice.
|
| 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.
| 3dsnano wrote:
| blazer rules, been using it since day one of our startup. it's
| great for situations where someone on the team needs a graph or
| CSV download of what's in the database. saves so much time and
| effort compared to writing code to do the same work. we have
| written over 100 different queries and dashboards in blazer and
| use it daily.
|
| ankane is a true wizard; dude has written so many other fabulous
| tools like searchkick & chartkick.
| jaxn wrote:
| That guy maintains a shocking number of projects. Pghero, Ahoy,
| a ton of useful Ruby data / ml libraries.
| fakedang wrote:
| Pg vector too! Andrew Kane is a beast.
| jnettome wrote:
| kudos for ankane! I make use of his gems on every single
| project I run. Ahoy is great too!
| petargyurov wrote:
| How does this compare to Metabase?
| nlh wrote:
| This looks super cool. One thing that stands out as missing (or I
| am missing it) -- does anyone know if there's a way to drill into
| the data and see the raw tabular data behind a given chart?
| That's one feature Metabase has that I find essential -- if a
| number in a chart looks off (or you're just curious) you can
| drill into the row-level tabular data and figure out what's going
| on.
| mosselman wrote:
| I love blazer. At our scaleup "making a blazer" has become a
| phrase among the non technical colleagues.
|
| 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.
| adawg_4 wrote:
| Reminds me of a specific type of flavor of WorkOS. I like it!
| philip1209 wrote:
| I love Blazer. I keep intending to make a fork with text-to-sql
| support, but haven't gotten to it yet.
| pianoben wrote:
| Blazer is amazing software. Simple, robust, _useful_ , and non-
| technical people can easily get the data they need, by
| themselves. Blazer Checks are a whole added dimension!
|
| 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.
| apsurd wrote:
| funny you mention blazer being a target for removal by big co.
| happened at instacart too! As the company scales, teams bring
| in the stuff they know. Like tableau. Tableau seems so
| terrible, ungodly slow, and stuck in 1990. i must be missing
| something as a non-data scientist.
|
| 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.
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