[HN Gopher] Show HN: Open-source BI and analytics for engineers
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Show HN: Open-source BI and analytics for engineers
We are building Quary (https://quary.dev), an engineer-first
BI/analytics product. You can find our repo at
https://github.com/quarylabs/quary and our website at
https://www.quary.dev/. There's a demo video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hO65_lkGU As engineers who have
worked on data at startups and Amazon, we were frustrated by self-
serve BI tools. They seemed dumbed down and they always required us
to abandon our local dev tools we know and love (e.g. copilot,
git). For us and for everyone we speak to, they end up being a
mess. Based on this, we decided there was a need for engineer-
oriented BI and analytics software. Quary solves these pain points
by bringing standard software practices (version control, testing,
refactoring, ci/cd, open-source, etc.) to the BI and analytics
workflow. We integrate with many databases, but we're showcasing
our slick Supabase integration, because it: (1) keeps your data
safe by running on your machine without data flowing through our
servers; and (2) enables you to quickly build an analytics layer on
top of your Supabase Postgres instances. Check out our Supabase
guide: https://www.quary.dev/docs/quickstart-supabase What we're
launching today is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. We
plan to keep the developer core open source and add paid features
like a web platform to easily share data models (per-seat pricing),
and an orchestration engine to materialize your data models.
Please try Quary at https://quary.dev and let us know what you
think! We're excited to put the power of BI and analytics into the
hands of engineers.
Author : louisjoejordan
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-05-15 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| From an external look, that sounds a lot like what dbt is meant
| to be. Why would one choose quary over dbt?
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey, OP here. We love what dbt has done for transformation-
| layer engineering. But we often see companies still struggling
| with a mess of unstructured dashboards, even with solid dbt
| models underneath.
|
| The problem is that dbt models and BI dashboards are often
| managed by separate teams. Quary brings the two together,
| letting engineers define reusable models and build well-
| structured dashboards on top of them in one cohesive, code-
| first environment.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| I think it finally occurred to me that you care only to
| transform data insofar as it is for the purpose of being used
| in BI/dashboards and not for data warehouse purposes. That
| wasn't clear to me at first but it makes sense.
| ksbeking wrote:
| While that's somewhat true, our CLI can push
| transformations back to your warehouse. We and some of our
| customer use Quary for their "data warehouse purposes"
| also. We think the integrated flow makes the E2E experience
| very quick.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what was the reason for the MIT -> Apache
| 2 move?
| https://github.com/quarylabs/quary/commit/db7a42a58ce66df13f...
| ksbeking wrote:
| Hey, Ben here from Quary; very valid comments like the one
| below copied meant we rethought our strategy it a little. We
| want to be open source but think we need a little protection.
|
| "Hate to derail the conversation, but is Quary something I
| could easily whitelabel to embed BI into my product for my
| customers? (Passively) looking for solutions in that that don't
| feel dumbed down."
| jsiepkes wrote:
| You mean protection as in protection from intellectual
| property (patent) lawsuits?
| ksbeking wrote:
| Yep, I meant protection in terms of intellectual property.
| _hl_ wrote:
| Hate to derail the conversation, but is Quary something I could
| easily whitelabel to embed BI into my product for my customers?
| (Passively) looking for solutions in that that don't feel dumbed
| down.
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey! OP here, I don't have a clear answer for this yet. We're
| exploring ways to make Quary more extensible. We are focusing
| on the core piece first, happy to chat to hear more about your
| specific use-case.
| vincentw21 wrote:
| this looks awesome!
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey! Thanks so much, really appreciate the feedback
| ksbeking wrote:
| thanks!
| b2bsaas00 wrote:
| How is different from Grafana?
| ksbeking wrote:
| Ben here from Quary.
|
| We love Grafana! It's fab for building dashboards, but it's
| focused on dashboarding/alerts and on pulling from various data
| sources, not just SQL.
|
| Quary is purely focused on SQL, and crucially, it allows you to
| build up and develop more complex transformations.
| tnolet wrote:
| How is this different from Lightdash?
| https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Big fans of our fellow YC mates at Lightdash!
|
| There are some core differences that make our product feel
| quite different:
|
| - Lightdash isn't Lightdash without dbt so you always have that
| divide even though they have done a fab job of minimizing it.
|
| - The editor for us is in Visual Studio Code which means you
| don't have that jump and can iterate all together.
|
| - Every thing is version controlled as a file in your
| repository which means you can add those engineering practices
| to the dashboards/charts themselves.
| cuchoi wrote:
| What do you mean by "Lightdash isn't Lightdash without dbt"?
| xn wrote:
| How does it quary compare to rill?
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey, great question ... Again another tool we love. A few key
| differences:
|
| - Visual studio code as the editor through and through
|
| - Dashboards are fully defined in code Quary which is different
| to Rill
|
| - At its core our architecture is also very different, Rill is
| built on top of Duckdb for that interactivity which can call
| out to other databases whereas we can call other SQL databases
| without everything going through DuckDB.
| halfcat wrote:
| We are looking at moving our Power BI stuff to Apache Superset
| [1]. How does this compare to Superset?
|
| [1] https://superset.apache.org/
| ksbeking wrote:
| Superset is a beautiful tool focused on self-serve with amazing
| visualizations. I won't take anything away from them!
|
| Our thesis is that self-serve is much less important than
| people think, and we find people often make a mess of never-
| ending dashboards. Current BI tools struggle to prevent that.
| We solve this problem with a core of software engineering
| practices.
| code_biologist wrote:
| If you're targeting use within software and engineering
| teams, that thesis may be right. If you're targeting adoption
| across whole businesses, I think the thesis is pretty wrong
| and will end up hampering adoption. To broadly bucket BI
| challenges, there's first the challenge of getting people to
| use the thing, then the challenges that come when everyone is
| using the thing. Tech types seem to underrate the challenge
| of getting people to even use a BI tool in the first place.
|
| I've found self serve to be a really effective tool in
| getting engagement with BI. My onboarding for new non-tech BI
| users was always to have them build a basic dashboard for the
| business process they were most focused on. Maybe set an
| alert or create a scheduled report delivery. By the end of a
| 15 or 30 minute onboarding session you'd see the click as
| they realized what they could do with it.
|
| That mess of never ending dashboards has another name: BI
| engagement. Though a product can help, having core dashboards
| and KPIs is a social and analytics leadership problem and not
| a technical one.
|
| Though I have issues with Looker (their dev experience is
| crappy), their approach to this is effective: make it
| difficult for self-serve users to get incorrect or nonsense
| answers, and make it easy for analytics admins to designate
| core dashboards and jockey a few hundred custom dashboards
| and reports as the underlying data models change. Every
| business unit got pretty attached to what they'd built for
| themselves.
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| You're spot on that BI adoption is largely a social
| challenge. Our thesis is that by defining the entire
| journey from source to viz as code, we create a structured
| foundation that LLMs can build upon, democratizing access
| to the transformation layer for non-engineers in a way that
| point-and-click BI tools can't.
| igeligel_dev wrote:
| All these comments ask for comparisons. It might be worth
| creating some alternative pages like podia do [1]. It could be
| helpful for your growth.
|
| Seems like a cool project!
|
| [1] https://www.podia.com/podia-alternatives
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey! OP here. This is really good feedback thank you.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Resembles Redash.
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey! We love Redash too. Where Quary is different is that we
| have more of an emphasis on Transformation. This means people
| can split out complex SQL blocks into modular, reusable
| components which improves data lineage (how the data flows from
| table to visualisation).
|
| Dbt makes transformations modular and easier. It applies
| software development methods to the T of ELT.
| rkuodys wrote:
| Does it support datasource merges like redash do? I had hard time
| looking for simple solution where I could easily join data from
| multiple sources and provide simple charts from engineering to
| support teams.
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| We do if you use DuckDB and you pull data from your data
| sources through DuckDB. DuckDB can act as a single interface
| between multiple data source types. Feel free to DM me with any
| more questions. around your specific use-case and I can help.
| tomrod wrote:
| This would make a good blog tutorial, I think.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Side comment: what an interesting landing page it has. That Slack
| CAT button right within the fold is a good idea. A walkthrough
| and a way to schedule a meeting with the founders. This is very
| straightforward. Good luck!
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| Hey! OP here. This made my day, thank you!
| nwatson wrote:
| See also Eclipse BIRT ...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project . It seems to have
| languished for a while but it's active once again based on
| updates to this Stack Overflow posting:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53362448/development-sta....
| louisjoejordan wrote:
| This is awesome! Great to see this project still alive after so
| many years :)
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