
Show HN: Cluvio – A new cloud analytics platform based on SQL and R - Maarius
https://www.cluvio.com/
======
Maarius
Hey, I'm Marius, one of the founders of Cluvio.

Cluvio allows you to run SQL queries against your database, visualize the
results as beautiful dashboards and share these dashboards within your
company.

We have integrated an R engine in the pipeline, so you can run custom R script
on the sql results to get combined power of SQL and R.

After working on Cluvio for 18 months, we launch today and would love to hear
your feedback.

Please use 'hacker-news-discount' when signing up to get a 30% discount for
the first three months.

~~~
Maarten88
The market for data visualization tools is crowded and has gotten very
competitive in the past year. Specifically, how does Cluvio compare to
Microsoft PowerBI? That also (already) has support for R, supports many more
data sources, seems to be more polished/mature, and is a lot less expensive,
it even has a free desktop version.

~~~
runako
I was curious and hadn't heard about PowerBI before, so I checked the site
just now.

Some obvious differences: PowerBI is priced per user, so it can get expensive
fast (assuming you need the pro features). Also, there doesn't appear to be a
cloud version of PowerBI so you'd be managing it yourself. PowerBI doesn't
support AWS Redshift or Aurora. And unless I'm mistaken, PowerBI desktop is
Windows-only.

~~~
Maarten88
You should read a bit further, I think only your last assumption is correct:
there is indeed no desktop client for Mac, so you have to use Windows to
design dashboards/reports. There are web, native windows, android and ios
interactive report viewers. With a single paid license you can publish to the
cloud and make reports available to anyone, even embed it in a website or app.
There's even a Redshift connector in preview.

------
tomasztomczyk
We're playing with Google Data Studio, which has Google Spreadsheets and
BigQuery support. How does this differ, assuming these integrations will be
supported in the future?

~~~
ianformanek
I am not too familiar with all capabilities of the Google Data Studio, but
from what I know they take a bit more the Tableau approach to defining data
sources as results of queries (BigData, MySQL) or sheets data.

I'd say Cluvio would be a bit more fun to use for anyone who knows SQL, the
ability to quickly iterate through sql queries to nail down the exact results
is quite addictive. Plus the additional capabilities of R make it even more
productive for lots of harder cases.

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kjbflsudfb
Under "Features" is 'Database Almanach' supposed to read 'Almanac' (no 'h')?

~~~
ianformanek
Thanks for the report - I actually noticed from spell checker (not being a
native speaker) the other day that 'almanach' is not the most common spelling,
but it is listed as an alternate spelling on wikipedia, so unless it obviously
comes across as a typo we'd keep it (to perhaps make it sound more like a DnD
spellbook ;-) )

~~~
huac
I think 'almanack' would be more recognizably 'almanac' from an English
speaker's viewpoint (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack)),
and still preserve that 'fantasy' vibe

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jkxyz
I've already suggested this as a replacement for my company's
Informatica/Salesforce/Custom reporting setup, which is a huge, confusing, and
time-consuming mess, for something that's really not business critical. Looks
to be a great balance of simplicity and power.

~~~
Maarius
Thanks :)

------
Maarius
Please feel free to also join the discussion on Product Hunt:
[https://www.producthunt.com/tech/cluvio](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/cluvio)

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apathy
nicely done, hope it works out as a business for youse guise

~~~
Maarius
Thanks!

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sv123
Plans for MS Sql Server support soon?

~~~
Maarius
It is planned, yes. We will add support for additional databases based on the
demand of our customers, so you becoming one would likely make it happen
earlier :)

~~~
ogsharkman
That's a weird statement for people who need mssql support.

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zgao
Is this basically Mode for R?

~~~
driftlogic
I have a lot of experience with Chartio and Mode.

I looked at the demo video, it didn’t appear to allow embedding of anything
that R would output but rather just appended data that was manipulated within
R back to the output of the original query.

Mode has python notebook integrated and can read in your queries as datasets
and then embed whatever you render from python. You cannot modify the original
data of the query within the python notebook and then use mode's stock
visualizations from the data you created in python.

This is a pretty big difference between the two if I'm understanding it
correctly.

The GUI/Dashboarding of this looks way better than mode.

I'm curious how Cluvio supports filters such as drop down menus, filters based
on dynamic queries (vs. hardcoded), and supporting drop down filters with
multi select. (Mode does these things very poorly, chartio does them pretty
well).

~~~
ianformanek
Very good points.

Re: the R output - for us the R script is an optional step on the data
pipeline, it can be either of these 2:

SQL Query -> (data table) -> visualisation SQL Query -> (data table) -> R
script -> (data table) -> visualisation

i.e. the R step is injected, takes data as input and produces data (in the
form of data.frame, vector of values or primitive values) as output.

Re: the filters. We support time-based filters very well with a nice UI
(custom time ranges, time ranges relative to today, additional comparison time
range). Custom value filters are currently in beta and once launched (in
couple weeks) will support multi-select as well as values based on dynamic
queries.

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infinite8s
Do you guys offer on-premise deployment?

~~~
Maarius
At the moment we are a pure software as a service and do not support on-
premise installation.

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vittore
So which RDBMS do you guys support?

~~~
ianformanek
At the moment we fully support Postgres, AWS Redshift, MySQL/MariaDB, AWS
Aurora. More to come as we see demand (comment here please!)

