
Show HN: Bdash – A simple business intelligence application - barlog
https://github.com/bdash-app/bdash
======
wingerlang
I have been looking for this for the past few days, something to graph
directly from my mysql.

Unfortunately the experience in this app is not too good

\- The app is just white and it takes a long time to startup, why isn't is
just a website?

\- Would be nice to just do it on data.

\- Clicking CMD+R to run my query for some reason reloads my "native app",
this just sucks in all web apps. At the time of writing this post I have done
it 6 times in a row.

\- My query for 500k rows took 90 seconds, compare this with sequel pro that
takes (well it states 373ms) but its spinner were there for like 10s, it shows
results instantly though.

\- Pressing enter on a 'setup connection' made it save, but not connect.
Better to just test the connection at that stage.

\- Trying to make a chart and there is no feedback, not sure if it is working
and loading, or if I chose wrong values or something like that. But at this
stage I'm more likely to close the app than to fix it.

\- I like to see my table structure while writing the queries

\- Auto complete?

Actually I thought I'd try with LIMIT 100; to see if it were snappier, so I
wrote it and pressed CMD+R...

Sorry for the negativity, I reallly want a tool like this, so if this can make
it better.

This being said, once I got one chart up and running it is kinda nice and
makes me want to continue playing with it a bit.

~~~
underyx
Try Metabase[0]! It's one of the most professionally maintained OSS projects
I've ever seen. For instance, I don't recall seeing design mockups for new
features before implementation elsewhere. And it absolutely shows in the app's
design.

[0]: [http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

~~~
sports-buddies
Thank you for this. This looks really good. Has anyone had experience
visualising millions of records in metabase with different users having access
to different sections? Basically, I am asking, can this replace SAP Crystal
reports?

~~~
underyx
I've never tried anything SAP, but we do have 10^7 order of magnitude tables
in Metabase, and we do use permission groups.

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chrift
Nice! I've been looking for a replacement for wagon since they got acquired.

Looking forward to using this.

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agounaris
How is this compared to an ELK stack? With elasticsearch & (kibana | grafana)
you get tonz of functionality with 0 effort...all you have to do is push data
to el.

~~~
chrift
And have an el instance and everything that goes with it...

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asavinov
Nowadays BI has (at least) two sides: visual analytics, and data wrangling.
There are many tools aimed at visualization. But there is a lack of tools for
easy data wrangling. I have been working on such a data wrangling tool, called
Data Commandr, and an early version can be tested here:
[http://dc.conceptoriented.com](http://dc.conceptoriented.com)

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jorgeleo
Disappointing click bait.

This is not BI, this is just charting SQL results.

~~~
tyingq
I'd agree it's not a full BI package, but software like "Crystal Reports" is
typically part of a BI suite. And while it has more features than this tool,
it is also essentially charting SQL results.

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chrischen
Would really love MongoDB support!

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v3ss0n
A Pandas clone in javascript?

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gressquel
so it doesn't support MsSQL nor Windows ? I think you should work on these two
if you want better reach.

~~~
kristiandupont
>Look, I made A!

Ok, but why isn't it B?

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thefahim
Love this!

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edvinasbartkus
Maybe bdash is more advanced with drawing graphs. In our small start-up, we
love using blazer:
[https://github.com/ankane/blazer](https://github.com/ankane/blazer). Everyone
can write queries, we can share it with each other, it has cashing layer for
fast results, it provides basic charts, it even has maps representation.
Thumbs for the team at Instacart for this OSS product.

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cshenton
For anyone interested in something a little more fleshed out than this,
Metabase is open source, works with most ANSI SQL DBs, and provides SQL and
non SQL interfaces for data exploration.

Plus it just looks darn nice
[https://github.com/metabase/metabase](https://github.com/metabase/metabase).
Not affiliated, but we've been testing it at work and it's great for
encouraging non analysts to get their hands dirty in data.

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opaque_salmon
This reminds me of a similar project, Redash
([https://github.com/getredash/redash](https://github.com/getredash/redash)),
at least in functionality.

This seems like it would be useful for data exploration, and I think the gists
are a great way of sharing queries.

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dglass
Reminds me of [https://www.wagonhq.com](https://www.wagonhq.com)

~~~
madenine
Wagon was such a great tool. Shame their acquisition took it away.

Colleagues who used wagon have said good thing about
[http://datamillapp.com/](http://datamillapp.com/) \- which I guess is trying
to be the spiritual successor to Wagon

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bdahz
This is a tasteless chicken. No one would take the effort to use it in real-
life business, since there are always better BI software available (Tableau,
PowerBI, etc.), with much better user experience (no need to write SQL) and
richer and finer plotting features.

I don't see any point in "reinventing" this.

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here. It breaks HN's rules to snarkily dismiss new work,
especially in Show HN threads:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

All new work is vulnerable this way. Sure, most of it won't amount to much,
but some will, and we want a culture in which people refrain from trampling on
it. Even if you were 100% right in this case, your comment violates the
categorical imperative.

