
Microsoft open sources SandDance, a visual data exploration tool - GordonS
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/10/microsoft-open-sources-sanddance-visual-data-exploration-tool/
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pedrokost
2 months ago I discovered Kepler[0] a tool by Uber for visualizing geo data.
It has been of tremendous help when analyzing large geospatial datasets. It
allows me to quickly visualize the results of my computations, and spot
anomalies and patterns that I wouldn't have noted without it.

This seems to be a similar tool, but for charting non-geographic datasets. It
should also be extremely useful.

I am glad companies are making these tools available for the masses.

[0] [https://kepler.gl/](https://kepler.gl/)

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noen
Both Kepler and Sanddance are built on top of another Uber creation called
[https://deck.gl](https://deck.gl)

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manigandham
This is a pretty neat package, and it's suprising how much it contains.

Reminds me of the Vega project [1] which never really got as much popularity
as it should have.

1\. [https://vega.github.io/](https://vega.github.io/)

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rjmorris
The SandDance README says it uses Vega for chart layout.

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manigandham
Missed that. Great to see the uptake then.

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skilesare
A company I worked for built this almost 10 years ago. Here is our video from
SIFMA where we gave a joint presentation with Microsoft. Interesting.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBaX_t_hvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBaX_t_hvM)

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_bxg1
> The release is comprised of several components that work in native
> JavaScript or React apps

This is worded poorly; at first I thought it meant React Native. I can only
tell that's not what it means because "native JavaScript", despite being a
weird term, wouldn't refer to that.

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hbcondo714
> SandDance shows every single row of a dataset (for datasets up to ~500K
> rows)

That is most impressive. Their online demo[1] has about 25K rows.

[1] [https://sanddance.js.org/app/](https://sanddance.js.org/app/)

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uberman
I guess I'm a little slow, but I was surprised that a plot of latitude and
longitude would generate something that looked like a map.

Of course thinking about it, it makes complete sense but I was genuinely
surprised at first.

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mistermann
What would be some unique uses for this that one perhaps couldn't accomplish
with more traditional visualizations, any ideas?

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conqrr
Yet another example of Megacorp attempting to swallow smaller fish (Tableau),
which showed a great example of leading the market with something innovative
and high quality. I haven't used PowerBI, but I have a feeling already that
this is going to work great for Microsoft.

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_bxg1
Tableau's licensing model/architecture is fairly draconian. You can't even
test it out for free without giving them public access to all the data you use
to test, and you can't embed it in a web app without having a dedicated
Tableau server process backing it. It's possible these constraints make sense
for enormous enterprise customers, but they make it impractical for small
companies.

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prepend
They have a 30 day eval that’s pretty decent for testing.

