Shameless plug for Metabase, which is also open source and does not require knowledge of SQL: <a href="http://www.metabase.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.metabase.com/</a> <a href="https://github.com/metabase/metabase" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/metabase/metabase</a><p>Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Druid, H2, SQLite, Oracle, Crate, Google Analytics, Vertica.
I strongly feel that if a domain language is not significantly more complex than the domain itself, then the person who is supposed to have domain knowledge should be able to learn the language without much difficulty. I've seen a lot of attempts to build 'simple' analytical systems without SQL, and it works well for simple queries -
but 'business people', when they're smart and motivated, soon start asking more and more specific and detailed questions, with additional conditions and joins - and it soon turns out that SQL is, in fact, an appropriate instrument for complexity that they need.<p>Your examples seem pretty simple. What about a question like this: how did our 5-week cohort (users that at the time of the event were registered between 4 and 5 weeks) ARPU vary over time and over character class they chose at registration? Is there a statistically significant corellation between participating in any of the 20 custom events we've done in the last half a year and user retention (which must be calculated relative to each users' cohort)?<p>Of course, a lot of business analysts are moving away from SQL to R, but I doubt that they're after simplicity.
Hey, this is cool. Thanks for making it available for free to the world.<p>Note apart, I feel like knowing SQL is something that every developer should be comfortable with. The amount of magic that an ORM does, will tend to zero the more SQL you know. It's weird that we as developers don't know how to query our main data repository, don't you think so?<p>Once again, thanks for making this available, I feel like this would be useful for a lot of people.
Looks interesting.<p>A few suggestions for useful features:
Time Series functionality would be handy (Exponentially weighted moving average, centered moving average etc).<p>Aggregations across sliding intervals (by shift / by day/week/month/ Finical year etc). Being able to quickly answer questions like What is the production for week to date, current shift etc. How about previous week/shift etc.<p>One other comment I will give is I find SQL to be useful as a protection against product lock-in. It's essentially the lowest common denominator language for dealing with data extraction/transformation etc. Our business has been burnt before by having our reporting/BI written in a tool specific language it made migrating away from the product very difficult. Ever since I've very much been of the mindset to do as much using SQL as possible.
Wanted to share about my BI startup here for those who're interested too: holistics.io - we're a small, self-funded BI startup in Asia (Singapore). Started 2 years ago and have customers around the globe, from small startups to big unicorns.<p><a href="https://www.holistics.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.holistics.io</a><p>We're not free or open-source, but a lot more affordable than other competitors. Our pricing starts with $50/mo for 5 users. We have a few customers who moved to us from open-source alternatives or other commercial competitors.<p>We support PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Redshift, Greenplum, BigQuery, Presto, etc.<p>If you try it out let us know you're from HN and your first 2 months are on us.
I'd like to build something in this area that used NLU (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding</a>) to let the user ask an actual question, after they have marked up their database schema. That would be a fun product to build.
For anyone interested in running a Docker/CentOS instance: <a href="https://gist.github.com/mrw34/d60fa30a08c864286e819647fc0eaac2" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/mrw34/d60fa30a08c864286e819647fc0eaa...</a>