Airbnb open-sources Caravel: data exploration and visualization platform

If anyone involved with this is around, I&#x27;m curious why Airbnb would build something like this - cost, performance, features, all of the above? Data querying and visualization is a pretty crowded field with a lot of commercial options to choose from[1].<p>I&#x27;m not knocking Caravel (it looks amazing) just curious why build vs buy in this case.<p>[1] Tableau, Looker, Periscope, Chartio, Qlikview, Gooddata are just some that come to mind.

I really like the Python style you guys have adopted.<p>Grouping imports into: standard lib, third party, local is a strong pattern that I don&#x27;t see done consistently in many repos. Likewise with your use of wrapping long imports with ()s and a single tab.<p>Any chance of sharing your Python style guide? My startup is Python based (Django and Flask) and would really appreciate it!

What&#x27;s the name of this style of plot?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;camo.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;c22acad6c1302c5da3236cb8eea816013a866006&#x2F;687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f44326b5a4c37712e706e67" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;camo.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;c22acad6c1302c5da3236cb8e...</a>

The code is so clean and simple. This is great PR for the company. I want to work there.

I&#x27;m wondering - what&#x27;s the effort required to build such a BI tool (tables, charts, maps) these days assuming reusing open source components and focusing on SQL-speaking datastores? Could a small team of experienced devs accomplish such a feat in a year?

I really need a great data explorer&#x2F;dashboard for my postgres-based systems. I was going to use shiny but this looks really nice -- I hope the docs can be built out very soon. Can anyone comment on other competing products? In the commercial space, I like Looker but its too pricey.

Hey, this is very interesting, I will take a look. I am trying to shift a whole $700m division and then hopefully $3b segment on a new workflow paradigm for data (automatically refreshed dashboards instead of sending around excel files, focus on building models and not data pasting in spreadsheets) and unfortunately for now Tableau is my only option. I feel very uncomfortable going with a closed solution since I know that we will have lots of edge cases and that being able to do your own coding is in the end the best way to deal with those. License cost is also incredibly high, we are talking $200 per user per year at minimum, that means 200 to 400 thousand per year for a big organization between 1000 and 200 users.

Wasn&#x27;t Panoramix already opensource?

It is not Java, but Python. What a surprise!

Have you considered using Re:dash[1] before writing your own tool?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getredash&#x2F;redash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getredash&#x2F;redash</a>

seems a little bit sparse on the documentation or am I missing something?

Having some trouble getting it working on Windows, which I see you don&#x27;t currently support (I need to create caravel_config.py to get past the fabmanager installation step). This looks really interesting but I might wait until someone has posted Windows instructions.

Great looking product! Has anyone figured out how to join tables yet, or do you need to define views in your sql database?

Its Apache licensed .. so it means can i use it directly in my company replacing the existing commercial products like Tableau &#x2F; Looker?

what are the supported data sources? I saw SQL tables and I imagine flat files, can you write calls to web service endpoints?

Awesome - great work!<p>A tutorial on how to link it to a mysql database would be greatly appreciated :)

Is this like piwik?

Any pictures anywhere?