

Ask HN: Hacker CEOs, what do you use for number crunching? - xal

I figured there are a lot of hackers-turned-ceos here on HN.<p>My question is: How do you go about number crunching? Like all SAAS companies we look especially at cost per acquisition, churn, lifetime customer value, committed reoccurring revenue and so forth.<p>Our full dataset is still only about 100GB so it's easily manageable in a SQL db. However, the times where I can get the information I need with single SQL queries are long gone. My instinct is to write a little rails app that aggregates all the key data together and present it nicely with some AmCharts. However, the scope of this project is giving me pause. This can easily become a project that I'd sink a lot of time into and instead I should spend time working on my business.<p>Are there any good off the shelf tools for such tasks? Frameworks that help? What do you do for reporting?
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jka
I'm not an executive, but certainly interested in data & reporting!

I was initially going to suggest a one-off cron job to run each morning,
aggregating the previous day's costs/revenues by the core 'dimensions' you use
(store, sales region, etc.). This could be done quickly with the 'ROLLUP'
modifier in MSSQL/MySQL, and the output placed into a summary table or
exported as spreadsheet/CSV data for quick analysis.

But reading your post again - I'm not sure where you're worried the time sink
will be; is it the interpretation & display of the data you have which you
suspect is going to be the tricky part?

The temptation might be to look towards more fully-featured OLAP/cube style
tools - they do need a good amount of time and focus though!

