
Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data - handpickednames
https://github.com/getredash/redash
======
arikfr
Hi! I'm the author of Redash :) Nice to see Redash at the top of HN.

I'll be happy to answer any questions about Redash, open source and about my
journey to make Redash a self sustainable project.

For any questions that don't fit on HN, feel free to reach me at arik at
redash.io.

~~~
mansigandhi
We LOVE REDASH at our company. Lack of adequate developers (the neverending
startup saga) meant not everyone got what they wanted, fast enough. Redash has
changed that for us. We use it extensively across all our teams (operations,
sales, marketing etc). Thanks!

------
xtracto
I tried Redash some time ago while I was looking for a very simple "BI" like
tool that our non-technical or low-technical colleagues could use (people in
Client Satisfaction team).

I settled for Metabase ([http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/) ,
[https://github.com/metabase/metabase](https://github.com/metabase/metabase)
), mainly for the ease of use and installation (a simple java -jar
metabase.jar does the trick).

Redash was a close second (one advantage at that time was the ability to have
users that could only read queries), but after fighting with it for a while in
order to install it, I tested Metabase and haven't looked back since.

~~~
arikfr
(Redash author)

Having a single executable is definitely the best, and I wish we had one for
Readsh... trying to compensate on this with the Docker and cloud (AWS / GCE)
images for easy setup.

~~~
foodabytes
How about bitnami? They provide Redash virtual machines and installers
already?

~~~
the_common_man
Or a cloudron app.

------
Signez
Looks great! What about open-sourced Superset[1] from AirBnB? Both looks
great, but Superset seems to have a superset of Redash features (bad pun
intended).

[1]: [https://github.com/airbnb/superset](https://github.com/airbnb/superset)

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Metabase is another great open-source tool:
[http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

~~~
hopeless
Metabase is my new favourite tool: I've probably use it every day to answer
some question instead of dropping into the Rails console. Things like: what
percentage of orders come from Stripe vs Paypal? Or export a list of users
that match this criteria. Or display the top 10 users by some metric.

It makes creating BI charts from a database easy enough that a non-developer
can do it. But when the going gets tough, I can still drop down to hand-coded
SQL. It was also an easy installation on Heroku.

It's not entirely perfect (combining multiple series on one chart is harder
than it needs to be; can only pull data from databases not APIs) but it's been
a success so far

~~~
tlrobinson
Hey I work on Metabase, thanks for the kind words and feedback.

Regarding pulling data from APIs, there's nothing inherently stopping us (or
you) from pulling data from APIs (in fact that's what the Google Analytics
driver does). Are you looking for integrations with specific 3rd party APIs,
or an easier way to integrate with your own APIs?

Feel free to respond here, email me, or file a GitHub issue. Thanks.

------
davb
Redash is fantastic. Things like scheduled queries just work, and the AMI is a
great way to get up and running quickly. The docs are decent and the upgrade
script works well. I also really appreciated the (optional) Login with Google
feature and the ability to limit it to certain email domains (we use Google
Apps, so it worked really well). We've been trialling it casually in our
engineering and data science teams.

However, the latest version is a little rough around the edges. Bugs like this
one
[https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520](https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520)
(can't delete users, even at the CLI) and this one
[https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-
dis...](https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-disable-
delete-a-user) (there's no option to delete a user in the admin UI, requested
since September 2015) make fall just short of production-ready.

~~~
arikfr
(Redash author here)

I was really hoping to address this in the upcoming v1.0.0 release, but
eventually didn't want to delay it as it was in the oven for too long anyway.
It will probably be addressed in the release after.

Beside the ability to delete a user have you experienced other rough edges in
the recent releases? We strive to improve the stability and reduce the rough
edges with every release, so really want to hear about your experience.

~~~
davb
Hey thanks for replying.

We noticed a couple of UI irregularities (for example when editing charts the
contents or axis labels would disappear). Unfortunately I don't have anything
more specific for you right now. I did notice when deleting users it seems
that they (and their dependent db objects) actually deleted from the database
(rather than flagged as deleted) - for traceability it would be great if they
weren't removed altogether.

Though to balance things, let me tell you what we loved about Redash. The
user/group/source model is really nice - I appreciated being able to give only
our admin group users access to a data source configured with our database
master user credentials. The Google OAUTH functionality (and really clear
documentation around this) and pre-rolled AMI were a huge plus, allowing me to
get our team up and running really quickly. The same goes for the Lets Encrypt
instructions (we all use certbot regularly but no-one had to dig through
Redash's config files blind - the docs were spot on). The ability to fork
queries - superb. Data export was also fantastic.

------
estsauver
We use Redash via ([https://redash.io/](https://redash.io/)) for a truly
hideous amount of stuff at our startup. We use it for almost every operations
dashboard, and we've also prototyped out a task allocation and field agent
management tool using them and Zapier.

They're really great, I'd highly recommend them to anyone.

~~~
arikfr
Thanks <3\. Always enjoy seeing what Eli does with Redash & Zapier. Really
looking forward for when the Zapier integration becomes official and goes into
their directory.

------
vitorbaptistaa
We've been using it on a project to aggregate clinical trial data from many
different sources ([https://opentrials.net](https://opentrials.net)) and it
has been great!

It allows researchers (not necessarily devs, usually medical doctors) to peek
our raw data, and it's a great excuse for them to learn at least the basics of
SQL. The response has been great.

We also use it to do some small data checks on the data quality, with alerts
sent to our Slack.

Highly recommended.

~~~
arikfr
Thank you for proving it's not only for "tech people", and that "normals" can
pass the SQL barrier too :) (and learn a useful skill on the way)

------
vaidik
We have been using Redash at our company for almost a year now. Every single
release just proves how promising the project is. You can make useful
dashboards in minutes. Support for multiple databases is amazing. We are using
it with multiple PostgreSQLs, Redshift, MongoDB and InfluxDB.

The most valuable feature is alerts though. I work at an ecommerce and
operations heavy company where we have tons of connected components. Where
alerts come really handy for us is that anyone in the organization can add
quick alerts for proactive monitoring of events recorded in on-field ops and
act when things go bad. This almost like building a feature on one of the
internal tools, just doing that yourself without any engineering support. This
comes in really handy.

Kudos to the team! Looking forward to some more amazing stuff in Redash!

------
gk1
I'm a marketing consultant and Redash has worked its way into my preferred
stack for analytics: Segment + Redshift + Redash.

It replaces event- and user-tracking tools like Mixpanel, Heap, Woopra, and
others. Those are just UI layers on top of SQL queries. If you or your
marketers know (or can learn) even basic SQL then Redash is what you want.

------
huy
I really like Redash, it’s one of the early tools that introduce this concept
of turn SQL into chart to developers, and also teach developers to learn and
write better SQL, altogether without any cost. I evaluated Redash during my
past company back in 2013 (we were also using Tableau), but due to some
Redash’s lack of features (no support for filters, lack of permission control,
sporadic performance), we went and build something inhouse with similar
approach (turn SQL into charts).

And inspired by the same path Redash founder took, that internal project
turned into a startup by itself.

We’re relatively new but getting good momentum. Some of our customers went
with us after evaluating both. While we don’t have a self-hosted open-source
version, our pricing only starts at 49$/mo for up to 5 users (pretty
affordable for startups IMHO).

You can check it out here:
[https://www.holistics.io](https://www.holistics.io)

~~~
aceregen
Hello! Redash is great if you are looking to host it in-house and have the
engineering resources to set-up and maintain it.

If you are looking for an affordable SaaS alternative, you may want to look
into Holistics (www.holistics.io). (Note I'm the other co-founder here with
huy)

Besides supporting native SQL, Holistics is designed to address the gaps of
SQL for common business reporting use-cases (flexible way of passing user
inputs as parameters into report query; supporting if-else capabilities in
SQL, reusable query templates and records/columns based access control for
users/user groups).

This makes it easier to manage and reduce the management of duplicate SQL
query syntax across multiple reports/dashboards (especially multiple
UNIONS/Case-Ifs statements). We also have our own DSL for you to configure in
more details how certain charts should look like (beyond the normal coloring).

A common problem we also see is that most data-related work is not just
visualization, mainly for the reason that most data are not
structured/formatted in the right table structure as most companies start off
without a data warehouse.

While most query tools requires customers to work with a separate
ETL/warehousing tool, we’ve built an integrated approach towards data
reporting and data preparation. Insights from our data reporting module
(reports with expensive joins, long query times, non-optimal table structures)
provides your data analyst inputs to easily move, map records, and transform
data without technical engineering knowledge. Data in Google Sheets or CSVs
with their data sync automatically (incrementally or full) to their database.

And all this is done with the data not leaving our customers’ database (we
don’t warehouse their data. Our data reporting module works directly with your
database, and our data preparation module provides just the utilities (not
infrastructure) to automate your data pipeline process.

Do take some time to check us out! Quote HN and we give you an additional one
day of free trial! :P

~~~
arikfr
> Hello! Redash is great if you are looking to host it in-house and have the
> engineering resources to set-up and maintain it. If you are looking for an
> affordable SaaS alternative...

Well, actually there is a hosted SaaS version of Redash too
([https://redash.io](https://redash.io)). This is what sponsors the work on
Redash.

------
Maarius
For those of you looking for a another fully hosted solution, check out
[https://www.cluvio.com](https://www.cluvio.com) (full disclosure: I am one of
the founders).

Like redash, Cluvio allows you to run SQL queries against your database and
quickly visualize results as beautiful, interactive dashboards, which can
easily be shared within your company or externally.

We developed our own custom grammar on top of SQL which makes writing time-
range related queries a lot easier and allows to parametrize queries, which
powers the dashboard interactivity.

We also allow to run custom R script on top of the SQL results, have SQL
Alerts that run at specified schedules, allow you to create SQL Snippets and
offer a free entry plan.

Currently supported datasources are Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MariaDB and
Amazon Aurora.

~~~
erlend_sh
Hey Maarius, thanks for chiming in! I've had my eye on Cluvio for a while so I
was gonna drop it in here to ask how the two compare.

For me, an open source core is a huge gesture of trust though. It's the
ultimate "no lock-in strategy" guarantee. This business model has been proven
sustainable by several SAAS companies, such as Automattic (WordPress.com),
Discourse (which I work for), Sentry, Piwik and hopefully Redash well!

Any chance Cluvio will consider going down this path too?

~~~
arikfr
At the moment (and I hope to keep it this way), it's not only the core of
Redash that is open source -- it's the whole product. There are a few features
that are introduced on the hosted version first, for ease of development. But
most of it goes to the open source first.

As we (Redash) use Discourse as well, it will be only fitting, to have
Discourse use Redash :-)

(btw, Sentry are Redash users as well[1])

Feel free to ping me (arik at redash.io).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631)

------
spapas82
Hello, it seems that there are no instructions on step-by-step installing
redash in your own server. The only thing I could find was info on how to
install it on AWS or using docker ([https://redash.io/help-
onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-ins...](https://redash.io/help-
onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-instance.html)). However I want to install
it normally, using my server's nginx / postgresql / python / supervisorctl
etc. Can it be done? Can you provide some step by step instructions ?

Thanks !

~~~
arikfr
(Redash author)

Step by step instructions could be great, but there is that much time in the
day, so figured that anyone who wants to customize the deployment, will know
how do it on his own (or use the bootstrap script for reference).

I'll be happy to answer questions on how to set it up in your environment,
you're welcome to the forum[1], Gitter[2] or Slack[3].

[1] [https://discuss.redash.io](https://discuss.redash.io) [2]
[https://gitter.im/getredash/redash](https://gitter.im/getredash/redash) [3]
[https://slack.redash.io](https://slack.redash.io)

~~~
spapas82
Thank you very much! I'll try using the bootstrap script and come to slack if
I encounter difficulties. Best regards!

~~~
arikfr
Just don't run the script as is on existing server. It's designed to run on a
vanilla server.

~~~
spapas82
Of course, I'll just use it as a reference to see the required components and
steps to integrate them - thanks again!

------
notdonspaulding
We're hosting on our own EC2 instance using the docker image. Setup was mostly
smooth. We love the integration with Google Apps so our entire organization
automatically has access.

We primarily use it to connect to Amazon's Redshift and pull some data out for
quick visual analysis. It's a very good combo. We're at the early stages of
using it but it seems like a very solid product.

Kudos to the dev!

------
CalRobert
Redash is handy, especially if you want to go from "I have a DB of events" to
"here's some handy dashboards" in just a few minutes.

Its filtering options were a little limited, at least as of November (you
can't inject anything in to the "where" part of a query).

~~~
arikfr
Re. filtering: do you mean something like parameters? Because that's
supported.

~~~
CalRobert
Not exactly. Say I have a table with one row per user and want users for a
given country. I could say

SELECT country_code AS country_code::multi-filter, count(1) AS users FROM
mytable GROUP BY country_code;

And I will indeed get a dropdown with country codes. But, the query is still
running for all countries (and if I'm not mistaken all the filtering is on the
client). For something more complex, like number of users from a country with
spend over a certain amount, I want something like:

SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users FROM mytable WHERE
lifetime_spend > {Value from a superset dropdown} GROUP BY country_code

I could do something like

SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users, lifetime_spend
from .....

and then filter on the Redash side, I suppose, but that will be slower and
have to deal with a lot of data I don't care about.

Has something like this been added in the last few months?

Also, Redash generally seemed to be based around the idea that you would write
SQL with a few parameters in the SELECT statement and users would be content
with that (which of course is true for many use cases!) We wanted to be able
to add a table to Redash/Superset/Metabase/whatever and have someone who
doesn't know SQL gain some insights quickly. For instance, distinct users in
the last week on a given platform from a set of access logs.

Still though, I meant what I said - I had Redash up and hooked to our DB with
useful charts in about 5 minutes, which was spectacular. As time went on
though we realized that a lot of people could answer their questions in
Superset without asking someone else to write SQL, while Redash required
someone to write a query.

Superset is definitely the less mature and polished product, though, perhaps
due to its ambition!

~~~
arikfr
The "::filter" convention is filters. We also have parameters (for some time
now, although only in v0.11 added UI for them). With parameters you can do:

SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users FROM mytable WHERE
lifetime_spend > {{minimum_lifetime_spend}} GROUP BY country_code

And minimum_lifetime_spend will render as an input box. Currently we only
support input boxes (of different types - number/string/date), but there is a
plan to add support for dropdowns there as well.

Allowing self serving without knowing SQL is the goal, but I believe it will
take time to do it right. We focus on delivering a great product for people
who know SQL, and allow them to give more interactive result sets to other
users using things like parameters.

So not sure if our goal is less ambitious, but we just take a different path.
And that's good I guess, it would've been not interesting if everyone built
the same thing, the same way :-)

~~~
CalRobert
That's great news about parameters, I don't think I used a version with those
included. Thanks again for building a quality tool!

------
ing33k
Also check out Zeppelin :

"A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make
beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala
and more."

[https://zeppelin.apache.org/](https://zeppelin.apache.org/)

------
uberneo
Added the missing Teradata support as the source (kind of) -
[https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-
support/83/...](https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-
support/83/16)

Waiting to resolve few more --

1) Functionality for CSV/XLS file import , like in Tableau . Some discussion
on - [https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-
source/216/5](https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-source/216/5)

2) Functionality to select "ALL" in filters

3) Functionality to merge data from multiple data source. I know it does
exists in Paid version but waiting for it come in Opensource version.

------
lolive
Are some public datasets available directly as SQL endpoints? I know the
Semantic Web provides some public datasets as SPARQL endpoints. But I have
never heard of an equivalent for SQL.

~~~
fhoffa
How about the BigQuery ones?

[http://demo.redash.io/](http://demo.redash.io/) works great with BigQuery.

------
kornish
Great work! A quick question: what differentiates Redash from Chart.io,
Periscope, or existing SQL-and-visualization BI tools?

------
kamranjon
I was working for a company that relied heavily on Wagon - and then it got
bought by Box and they shutdown the product. We looked for alternatives but
nothing seemed to offer what Wagon had - this looks like it might be a good
fit though. Excited to try it out.

~~~
seppemans
You should also check out DataMill
([http://www.datamillapp.com](http://www.datamillapp.com)), it's quite similar
to what Wagon offered. Installed as an app, context-aware SQL autocomplete and
built-in charting. It's in public beta - give it a try :-)

(DataMill author)

------
j_s
Ask HN: Is there any open source BI tool that is always first on the list when
the conversation finally gets to

 _" Oh, you're on the Windows/Microsoft stack? Then you're probably going to
wind up using _______"_

~~~
sixdimensional
I think part of the reason this happens is Java has wider support out of the
box for most data sources via JDBC than Windows has with ODBC/ADO.NET. I mean,
it's a close race, but most new open source databases have Java/JDBC drivers
first and then ODBC second, for example. I think this may change a little with
.NET being opened and cross platform, but it might take a while.

Of course you can make Java/JDBC connections from Windows to databases but
many users somehow find it more difficult and I've noticed an annoying trend
among large enterprises running Windows on the desktop to not want to support
Java/JDBC tools on the desktop, unless they are invested in it.

~~~
j_s
Thanks for taking the time to respond!

I'm not unstanding why you mentioned Java/JDBC, I'm not aware of any of the
mentioned tools (redash,superset,blazer; turns out metabase uses Clojure)
using Java. Only redash doesn't list SQL Server support. What am I missing?

~~~
sixdimensional
Well, I meant in the general context of database connectivity. The underlying
database connectivity plumbing is almost always a JDBC or ODBC interface when
you're talking a regular DBMS [1].

Historically, ODBC was not always as popular on Linux (being a Microsoft
standard originally), although that has changed a lot by today. JDBC was
usually more associated to open source/Linux BI/database tools (Java being
open source in origin itself), which is why for a while, you could connect to
more data sources with JDBC drivers/interfaces than ODBC. Writing a JDBC
driver is also many times less complicated than writing an ODBC driver. The
ODBC spec is old and complicated.. JDBC is still difficult but much less
complicated.

Most programming languages can get to either a JDBC or ODBC driver via some
mechanism, on pretty much any platform. So today I guess it's hard to say that
it matters (ideally it shouldn't), I was just giving my personal take on the
historical context that lead to the comment you made - "why doesn't this run
in the Microsoft stack?".

All of the tools mentioned (redash, superset, blazer) are relying on the
underlying interfaces in ODBC / JDBC for regular databases. If the system is
running on Unix and accessing ODBC, it is almost guaranteed to be using
UnixODBC to be doing so. Any tool like this (I don't know the internal-
specifics of these tools) would probably have built a layer in to abstract
away the low-level interface into some mechanism that hopefully makes the use
of JDBC or ODBC (or any interface) irrelevant. That's a lot harder than it
seems on the face of it. I used to work for a company that made a product that
connected / federated data from "any" platform - which is partly what
influences my opinion of how difficult it is to wrangle all these interfaces
at lower-levels.

EDIT: I think the crux of what I'm saying is, the reason you don't have a tool
that pops up when you ask that question is, because of OS platform
differences, with Linux/open source usually being the first priority over
Windows historically.

[1] Some DBMS provide native web services connectivity which obviates the need
for JDBC/ODBC completely.. which is kind of nice.

~~~
caravel
For Superset we use SQLAlchemy and much of the connectivity goes through the
DBAPI Python abstraction, and I believe most of the drivers are using native
implementations.

~~~
sixdimensional
And there you have it, "turtles all the way down". SQLAlchemy sitting on
DBAPI, where you can get to databases primarily through: 1) ODBC/JDBC, 2) ADO
or 3) native Python database drivers contributed by the community that speak
the wire protocol of the database (usually wire protocols that are open source
or openly documented).

These abstractions most programming languages have make the problem mostly go
away for developers.

However, sometimes you'll find (as is sometimes the case with SQL Server, for
example) that the fastest or most complete/stable database driver is a
specific one that is not quite 100% (but could be 99.9995% supported)
completely supported. For example, Python gets to SQL Server via ADO (only on
Windows) or some driver (usually ODBC) that talks TDS protocol - often FreeTDS
(open wire protocol compatible with SQL Server).

We are definitely in a better state today with regards to programming
language/framework support for interfaces to databases, but I think the
historical context of the original "generic database interface standards"
(JDBC/ODBC) is important to understand to know how we got to where we are, and
why sometimes people struggle to ask "what BI tool is the first to come to
mind on Microsoft/Windows stack"? Don't get me wrong, plenty of
Microsoft/Windows supported BI tools exist, and cross platform abstractions
like those in Python make it so OS matters much less (but still matters).

------
etatkomoona
Redash is great. We've tried several alternatives, including Metabase, and
ended up with extensive Redash use. We use the self-hosted version for sharing
data between the tech and business sides, for day-to-day monitoring and for
ad-hoc visualizations, and are generally very happy with it. It's not perfect
- there are some areas, like fine-control over chart customization, query
auto-updates (especially queries with parameters) and the ability to queue
parallel queries to the same data source which would be nice improvements, but
these are nitpicks - highly recommended.

~~~
marrone12
I've been looking at metabase myself. What were your main issues with it?

~~~
etatkomoona
The main issue for us was support of JOINs (note that this was a while ago,
not sure what's the status now; I did find this relatively recent discussion,
though [1])

[1] [http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins](http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins)

------
_joel
Do any of the dashboards mentioned support exporting to a report?

~~~
arikfr
You mean as a PDF or email?

~~~
_joel
Yes, essentially. An export to a file on a given time period would be fine,
can deal with the format conversion etc myself. I'm thinking of sending
arbitrary reports to management without the need for Jasper etc.

~~~
arikfr
Exports to CSV or Excel are already available. In future releases we will add
support for full reports with visualizations and everything.

It's actually already possible with some scripting and our API, but I want to
add it into the product itself.

~~~
sixdimensional
Also, publish data set as a web service dataset, and now you're into the
features offered by "data virtualization" software vendors / tools (things
like Teiid or Denodo, for example).

------
actuator
Thanks, @arikfr for the project.

We started using redash about 2 years back. We use it for ad-hoc SQL to
Redshift and MySQL and most of our business level KPI dashboards are there.
One thing I would want to do is add some metabase like segmentation
there(preferably that works with joins), so that marketing/sales people can
also actively query from it.

------
ehfeng
We use Redash at Sentry and it's become critical for marketing, sales, even
engineering.

Open source ftw!

------
mmonihan
Has anyone prioritized adding the ability to modify the HTML of the report the
way ModeAnalytics.com does?

I frequently want to map the data directly to highcharts.js when the UI can't
get me to the result I want.

------
yalooze
Reminds me of Blazer
[https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer)

------
fudged71
For data visualization I recently switched from SQL+Excel to Tableau, and I'm
never going back.

~~~
teej
My qualms with Tableau is that they've moved excruciating slowly on MacOS
support and that getting started from scratch seemed like a major development
effort. We evaluated Tableau against Looker and are now very happy customers
of the latter for a year+.

------
overcast
How does the externally hosted version connect to databases?

~~~
arikfr
(Redash author)

You will need to allow access from our servers to your database. It's
obviously a security concern, but we take great measures to ensure the safety
of your data.

If that's not an option, you can always run Redash self hosted.

------
Jonovono
After trying pretty much every BI tool we went with
[http://modeanalytics.com/](http://modeanalytics.com/) and have been pretty
happy!

------
torkale
This is awesome!

------
tdelmas
I didn't find 'The Art Of Computer Programming' by Donald Knuth... Must be a
mistake.

