
Insights – Open-Source Self-Hosted Business Intelligence Platform - mariusandra
https://github.com/mariusandra/insights
======
thenaturalist
I totally do not get the negative comments.

Having seen a fair share of BI tools (I created and maintain an "awesome" list
at [1] which I created for the sole purpose of getting an overview of what's
out there) and assessing the stage you're at developing solo, you're getting
quite some important UI basics very right imo.

The "Next Steps" give a great impression of what's possible and how to
navigate the app.

From an E-Commerce viewpoint, most people want to flexibly play around with
Products, Orders and Order Line Items and ratios between the three.
Configuring this by hand in something like Google Datastudio etc. is
cumbersome, even or more so in Looker (if broken out into separate Views, one
needs to needs to create Merged Results Looks; if not the different
cardinality objects are always connected). I feel like Insights is handling
this really well. If you would add support for calculated fields, you'd offer
a compelling E-Commerce controlling solution.

One issue I noticed though is that your nesting seems to be unlimited. I could
open an infinite "table" tree if I start from the order_lines or product view
--> order_lines --> order --> order_lines --> product --> seller --> orders/
products... ad infinitum.

You want to make sure that this drilldown into FK relationships does not lead
to loops. Also I think some visual support where in the nest tree one is at
(orders --> order_lines --> product --> sellers) would be great, otherwise
it's quite easy to get lost.

Other than that honestly congrats on doing a lot of things right in terms of
data viz, responsiveness, sharing capabilities. Really like your work!

[1]: [https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-
intelligen...](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence)

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mariusandra
Hey, thank you for your kind words!

I've been putting a lot of effort into the UI/UX lately and it's great to see
it paying off... even though there is still so so much to improve.

We actually already have support for calculated fields! Just edit a "subset"
and you can add as many custom fields as you would like. [1]

Thanks again for the feedback! :)

[1] [https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/53387/74677547-e8d...](https://user-
images.githubusercontent.com/53387/74677547-e8d00280-51b8-11ea-922b-1746b38831d6.png)

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_frkl
Nice, well done! I'm using Metabase at the moment, which I quite like, except
for a few little annoyances. What was your motivation for writing this, and
where do you see insights differ from the current main players like metabase,
superset and redash?

Feature wise, in case you are interested, for these tools it is important to
me to be able to create the graphs/dashboards in an automated way, e.g. via an
api. Import/export would also be good. Also: openid support, ldap would be
nice to have too, but openid would suffice.

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mariusandra
Hey, thanks!

Regarding Metabase, Insights has full blown first class support for joins...
so we don't have to write blog posts like this [1]. My research shows Metabase
works great with normalised tables (like a CSV file? normalised NoSQL table,
etc)... but falls short when you need to visualise relations between tables.
You can look at for example all your orders, think "I wonder what's the
highest grossing country" and have the results at your fingertips.

Regarding Redash, which seems to be a nice SQL editor, in Insights you don't
need to know any SQL to get answers. Thus "business stakeholders" can get
dirty with the data with minimal training.

Regarding Superset, I'm unfortunately not familiar with its latest features.
Please somebody reply with an overview! :) Last time I checked it (many years
ago), it was pretty complicated to get it installed (some python issues?) and
I'm not sure if you could explore data without knowing SQL. Insights in
comparison is super easy to install (npm install -g insights) and get going
with.

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

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salsakran
I work on Metabase and wanted to say congrats on putting all this together.
Excited to see more open source options for BI.

Just as a point of fact - that blog post you linked to is 3.5 years old at
this point.

Even at that time we had implicit joins (for things like top grossing
countries if you had an FK in your transactions back to a table w/ the country
field).

We've had joins in our notebook mode for a while now
([https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/users-guide/custom-
ques...](https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/users-guide/custom-
questions.html))

~~~
mariusandra
Ah, my apologies! Thanks for clearing this up!

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fsajkdnjk
The title should be: "Insights is a tool to visually explore a PostgreSQL
database"

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lappa
IMO, your demo site could be improved by having some widgets created in
advance.

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saber6
Already on my nope not even gonna try it list.

The demo page does that annoying crap where it tries to prevent you from
navigating to your prior site.

I thought that trend peaked in like 2001.

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mariusandra
I can assure you, that's a bug and not an intended feature.

Thank you for your feedback.

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saber6
In that case I apologize for the prior tone.

I will check it out now that you have stated it is a bug.

Thanks!

