
Google Data Studio - mkalygin
https://www.google.com/analytics/data-studio
======
teej
There are dozens of things like this now, so Google is pretty late to the
game. I suspect that the play here is to keep people in the Google ecosystem
by competing with Amazon on product offerings.

Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate
these kinds of services -

1/ How easy is it to get data in?

2/ Is my data safe?

3/ How easy is authoring?

4/ Does it support pivots?

5/ Can I model joins?

6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters?

7/ Does it support complex time comparisons?

If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the
case of Google Data Studio:

1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems
decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red
flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery.
7 - No examples, red flag.

I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to
overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of
analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the
gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually
managing a business week-to-week.

Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard
tells me:

\- How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD)

\- ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period)

\- ... relative to my goals

\- And a breakout of the drivers of that performance.

Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date
range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then
never revisit.

~~~
iaw
After some of the product shutdowns by Google I feel like there's a huge risk
building your visualizations on this product.

There are so many alternative ways to achieve the same goal for free or very
low cost that unless Google has some secret sauce the product will probably be
dead in a few years causing headaches for anyone relying on them.

~~~
ehsankia
I don't understand how people keep bringing up Google product shutdowns as if
literally half their products get discontinued. Yes, there are a couple, but
that's because they have so many more products than any other company. I'm
sure if you looked at it percentage wise, they're actually probably on the
lower end compared to most other companies.

Obviously if you make thousands and thousands of products, then a couple will
eventually have to be dropped. Can you even name me 5 big products they've
ended which had a huge impact.

~~~
FooHentai
>there are a couple, but that's because they have so many more products than
any other company. I'm sure if you looked at it percentage wise, they're
actually probably on the lower end compared to most other companies.

First cut from just checking Wikipedia. Number of google services: 117. Number
of discontinued google services: 43.

So what's that.. about 40%?

~~~
shakil
I'd say 0, since eyeballing the list almost none of them seem to be B2B type
products.

This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they
launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what
happened to Reader!"). Its also completely misleading when applied to Google
Cloud Platform which has been around for almost 9 years now without
deprecating any service.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud Platform

~~~
FooHentai
>I'd say 0, since eyeballing the list almost none of them seem to be B2B type
products.

If moving the goalposts is allowed then fair enough, it can be any number you
choose.

>This is by far the most pervasive comment on HN regarding Google ("Oh, they
launched something, don't use it because they will retire it soon. Look what
happened to Reader!").

Yes, hello, reality calling - Google has a PR problem, as a direct result of
canceling services. This PR problem is bleeding into their commercial
offerings precisely because of their reliance and cultivation of grassroots,
technology-minded consumer mind share. "Man, I killed all those bees but for
some reason now my honey production has dropped right off. Could there be a
connection???"

Someone did not properly cost this into the decision to terminate those
services, and it's now biting the organization. _It should be_.

~~~
nindalf
He's not moving the goalposts. This thread is about a b2b product, which he
claims are unlikely to be shut down. If you're trying to extrapolate about a
b2b product from past experience about free software, you should justify that.

~~~
nightski
Specifically it is a dashboard creator b2b product. I bet the google shutdown
rate on that is pretty good!

Sarcasm aside, by narrowing the results the goalposts are indeed shifted.

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
Is it a shift or a correction?

Google's cloud offerings are generally going to have more robust SLA's
attached to them, that include various guarantees wrt. service deprecation,
that probably compare with other vendors in the same space.

So I do think "moving goalposts" here is probably right. Comparing Reader,
Buzz or Google Code to GCP offerings probably is an apples to oranges
comparison. In other words, not very useful.

------
Finbarr
You can connect Postgres, but not via ssl:
[https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r...](https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&ref_topic=7332343).
It explicitly says "Be careful with the data you send.". Sounds like something
to not connect to your production db.

~~~
beefsack
> Sounds like something to not connect to your production db

With or without SSL, exposing your raw prod data to external services like
these is a huge risk. Only ever share filtered and redacted data with external
entities.

~~~
slagfart
I think, with Postgres, if you have:

1\. A dedicated read-only schema

2\. A dedicated user, with only CONNECT to the read-only schema

3\. A unique password

4\. A dedicated read-only replica DB

you should be safe against pretty much everything.

I'd actually like to be corrected if I'm wrong - this is how I've built
numerous externally-facing services.

~~~
philip1209
For non-secured connections, a snooper could still gain full access to all
production data.

~~~
slagfart
How? Even with the password for this user, you could still only gain access to
the read-only schema.

Something I should have spelled out - the read-only schema has only the data
that the charts need (heavily aggregated views). We basically build with the
assumption that the schema will be compromised, but only that one schema.

~~~
andrewstuart2
Without ssl all that data can be observed in transit between your read-only
schema and the consuming service. There's very low risk to integrity (i.e.
nobody can modify data via read-only methods), but complete list of
confidentiality.

------
golfer
Wonder why this is just bubbling to the top now; Data Studio has been out for
over a year. Here's 2 previous Hacker News discussions on it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883)

~~~
jamesgeck0
I'm guessing it's because they recently launched support for 3rd party data
connectors.

------
lostsock
I'm currently using [https://metabase.com/](https://metabase.com/) for this
which I've found to be really easy to use. Will be interesting to see how this
compares.

Obvious advantage of metabase is that it's all local.

~~~
fhoffa
Metabase is great - and another open source dashboard solution I'm a big fan
of: [https://redash.io/](https://redash.io/)

Data Studio has a different set of strengths: It's the quickest way I can get
an interactive viz published with 0 infrastructure needed. Just build your
dashboard, add some controls, and publish it to your closest connections
privately, or publicly to the whole world. It will scale without any resource
allocation on your side.

(disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud
[https://twitter.com/felipehoffa](https://twitter.com/felipehoffa))

(in a parallel thread, someone else mentions how they use re:dash and Data
Studio
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296))

~~~
neves
Weird, there is no evident link to the source code in the redash.io page, but
you can find it if you search:
[https://github.com/getredash/redash](https://github.com/getredash/redash)
They give you an already configured virtual machine for free, but it doesn't
receive bug fixes. The install process must be a mess.

Metabase has a link to their repository in the first page of
[https://metabase.com/](https://metabase.com/) Just based in this fact I would
prefer Metabase.

How do they compare to generate high quality reports?

~~~
arikfr
Most people don't care about the source code, but we have a huge link to the
setup guide [1] (and there is a link to GitHub in the footer).

Also I'm not sure where you bring the "but it doesn't receive bug fixes"
statement from? We have a documented upgrade process [2] for the images you
create using our documented setup guide.

[1] [https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-
ins...](https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-
instance.html) [2] [https://redash.io/help-onpremise/maintenance/how-to-
upgrade-...](https://redash.io/help-onpremise/maintenance/how-to-upgrade-
redash.html)

~~~
neves
The github link is a really hidden small icon. I probably also don't care
about the source, but if it is hidden, it looks like it is difficult to get
and/or install.

Your front page says of the paid version: "Don't worry about installations,
hosting and upgrades. All plans include a 30-day free trial. No credit card
required."

My first impression was that it is hard to upgrade. Maybe not true, but it is
what is communicated by the site.

------
dbranes
Note an open source alternative is superset[1] (formerly Panoramix/caravel by
airbnb)

[1]([https://github.com/apache/incubator-
superset](https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset))

~~~
thenaturalist
I'm actively compiling a list of both commercial & open source BI/ data viz/
ETL tools [1] in case you're interested in getting an overview.

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

~~~
madenine
[https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.p...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.pdf?t=149626062)

Gartner report on commercial BI/Analytics might be useful to you

~~~
thenaturalist
Thanks, will go through it on the weekend and make additions!

------
lanbanger
October 2020: "Google is winding down the Google Data Studio product over the
next year, but will provide customer and technical support through the
duration of license agreements.”

~~~
simonsarris
On this note, Google is about to destroy everyone's Google Finance portfolios
in November, without sending any kind of message to users, even as they claim
they are relaunching the product.

I didn't find this out until yesterday, I've been out of the US and won't be
back until almost November. Google didn't email Google Finance users, they
just posted a blurb at the top of the portfolio pages mentioning that if you
want to keep your data you should download it.

~~~
kuschku
I at first didn’t believe you, but you’re right, they’re shutting down Finance
in only a few weeks for a relaunch without portfolios:
[https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png](https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png)

------
curiousgal
You can't beat Tableau for this sort of task if you're not technically
inclined and if you are then you can't beat Shiny. Both offer better and more
customizable results. I wonder what the added value of this software is.

~~~
tgtweak
Tableau is great but is also pricey. I like that it can be on-prem which is a
nice feature most saas players can't match. They have drivers for tons of
sources.

Zoomdata is a good alternative, but pricey and not mature enough I feel.

PowerBI is getting surprisingly good, and if you're a Microsoft or R shop it
can be a really nice fit for the price. I've thrown a few 50GB+ CSVs at it.
It's basically Excel on steroids. If you're dealing with some data stores
(like mongo, elasticsearch) then PowerBI isn't viable natively.

Interesting to note that zoomdata and tableau use spark under the covers iirc.

~~~
infinite8s
I don't think Tableau uses spark. They have their own server side data engine
(from their earlier acquisition oh HyPer).

~~~
aarongolliver
You're right that we don't use Spark as our data engine, but we also don't use
hyper yet either (well, we do in beta[0] :). Hyper is replacing our existing
data engine (conveniently named "Data Engine" [1])

[0] [https://www.tableau.com/products/coming-
soon](https://www.tableau.com/products/coming-soon)

[1] [https://research.tableau.com/paper/analytic-data-engine-
visu...](https://research.tableau.com/paper/analytic-data-engine-
visualization-tableau)

------
fhoffa
Play with a live interactive Data Studio dashboard - the most famous reddit
accounts:

\-
[https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/rep...](https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/reporting/0ByGAKP3QmCjLVUc4b2laRzNRQ1U/page/RFtG)

(the story behind: [https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-
accounts-c9...](https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-
accounts-c9958b5bc376))

------
nrjames
I've been using this on the backside of Firebase Analytics (aka Google
Analytics for Firebase) through the Firebase export to BigQuery. It's a
powerful tool, but can be frustrating working with the schema that Firebase
uses for BQ export. One thing that drives me nuts is that Data Studio does not
alphabetically sort the fields in the attached BigQuery data set. I suppose
they are listed in the order they appear in the schema, but wading through 30+
column names looking for the one you want is a pain when they're not sorted.

If you use BigQuery and Tableau, you can hook those together, so there's not a
ton of incentive to use Data Studio, too, unless it fits a need for sharing
with a team.

I can't speak to other Data Studio uses.

------
pmichaud
I need something like this, but I'm not willing to bet on a google product
that will get shut down in a year. It's not worth it, I'd rather do a little
extra work to build something custom that will exist as long as I need it.

~~~
UncleMeat
Is this post going to get made for literally everything that Google launches?

~~~
PascLeRasc
Without a doubt. I've gone one step further and stopped being friendly to my
coworkers in case they change jobs and I don't see them again.

------
johnnyo
Sounds like a great idea, except for the part where I need to send all my data
to Google.

~~~
slagfart
This happily runs off a view that's got an aggregated subset of your data - so
instead of sending customer IDs, consider sending a count of customer IDs
against each metric instead.

~~~
curiousgal
Too much effort for so little added value. Plus you'll have to change things
back when Google kills this project.

------
n_t
As if they already don't have enough, feed more data in to Google.

------
digitalengineer
I use this. I think it's not really for the developer, but rather for the
Google Analytics guys. Add Analytics and Search Console data. Works great to
get it out of the standard interface and make it more accessible for clients;
what content is most popular? Is it moving up/down compared with the same
timeframe before it? How are my pageviews/sessions doing? (Compared to
previous), Avg. Time spend on site, % of sessions with search, up/down, what
did they search for on my site? Where's my traffic coming from? How are the
social channels performing? Whats the % desktop/mobile/tablet? How many
impressions/clicks did the site make? Whats the site's CTR (and per search
term)? Show the trends for the average position in Google, and so on...

------
ehfeng
We use this at Sentry for reporting for non-SQL-literate folks (also so we
don't need to grant yet another 3rd party access to our data). It works pretty
well

We mostly use self-hosted Redash for day-to-day analytics for ad-hoc analytics
questions.

------
doh
I'm using it for couple of months now. Great for simple queries, especially
when you just quickly need to plot out data to see what's going on. Usually I
did these things in matplotlib, pandas and it takes a lot of time to prepare
the basics.

Once you need something complicated, you will have to or spend decent amount
of time preparing the data or back to coding.

------
greggman
well since I see no way to report this issue to google directly and on the off
chance someone from Google will see this ...

selecting the language at the bottom of the page does nothing for me on iOS
Chrome. Didn't try other browsers but guessing it's not iOS chrome specific.
note my iOS is set to japanese

------
jordache
This vs MSFT Power BI?

~~~
Paraesthetic
Thats what I thought too

------
kasperset
Looks very similar to Tibco's Spotfire which I saw today at a data conference
and also found
[https://superset.incubator.apache.org](https://superset.incubator.apache.org)
by browsing over this last week.

------
beefield
Two things that annoyed me when I last reviewed:

There is no way to display individual time series data points, but they are
always aggregated, and minimum resolution is one hour.

You can have only 10 time series in a single visualization.

(Of course, I just may not know how to use this...)

------
jonbaer
If you have a local setup, a ton of data, and a few good GPU(s)+ I would go
bare metal with MapD ([http://www.mapd.com](http://www.mapd.com)) vs. the
cloud.

------
Maarius
Shameless plug: Have a look at Cluvio
([https://www.cluvio.com/](https://www.cluvio.com/)) for SQL-based alternative
(disclaimer: I work there).

------
thomasklau
Why would I use this over Dash (Plotly)?

[https://plot.ly/products/dash/](https://plot.ly/products/dash/)

~~~
kingnothing
1\. I've heard of Google but not Plot.ly

2\. It's free, Plot.ly is $10,000 per year.

~~~
txcwpalpha
Plot.ly is one of the largest, most widely used packages in the world of data
science/visualization. If you haven't heard of Plot.ly, then you aren't the
target audience for Google Data Studio anyway.

------
foreigner
Why the heck don't they support SSL to Postgres? It's not like it's hard,
surely it's built in to the driver, they just need to switch it on?

------
ryeon
If you're trying to do any type of time frame comparisons (w/w, m/m, y/y)
Google Data Studio is the WORST!

------
fredliu
From the website, pretty hard to figure out exactly what's different about it.

From the looks, is it something like AWS's QuickSight?

------
ClassyJacket
While I'm sure this is useful to the right people, unfortunately my reaction
when I see a new Google service announced is "Nobody should use this, it'll be
abandoned in six months and shut down in twelve."

I hope Google realises this is a viscous cycle where people avoid signing up
for their services, causing low usage, causing them to abandon it, causing
lower usage, causing them to shut it down, causing people to avoid signing up
for their services...

~~~
s17n
Is Google actually more likely to shut down a given service than any other
company?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Seems so, especially that most of the time we're talking about companies for
which a given service is their only product.

Personally, I've learned to treat SaaS products as throwaway by default. That
is, if I can benefit from it short-term, like in 3 to 6 weeks, I may sign up.
But I don't expect it to exist in 3 to 6 years, so I'm not going to invest
much into using it.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
I don't specifically blame Google when they acquire a startup and shut down
the service. We don't know the financial condition of the company before the
acquisition. Would you rather Google wait for the startup to officially fold
and then scoop up the assets in bankruptcy?

Their numbers definitely are adversely affected by these "acquisitions"

------
pier25
Is there a way to use a REST API as a data source?

I'm not very comfortable with giving Google access to our databases.

~~~
lolive
I think you spot the real question. What are the tools that deal with data viz
without forcing you to share the data?

~~~
corford
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, good free ones are:
[https://metabase.com](https://metabase.com) and
[https://redash.io](https://redash.io)

------
SubiculumCode
Is there anything here for a behavioral scientist, or it really geared for
business data?

~~~
futhey
Business data. If you're currently using SQL for data exploration you're
probably not the audience for google data studio.

------
smilbandit
I've been using this since spring/summer. Is there a new release or something?

------
wyldfire
Are there any open source offerings that are comparable?

~~~
neves
[https://metabase.com/](https://metabase.com/)

------
jmkni
Surprisingly, they've built it on AngularJS!

~~~
macspoofing
Surprisingly?

~~~
jmkni
Yeah, considering they are on Angular 5 now it's surprising that they have use
1.x.

------
fbonawiede
This is not news?

I use Metabase, and will continue to use it.

Also in the process of setting up Luigi (created by Spotify team) to control
dependencies and the ETL process prior to Metabase.

------
lerie82
And now they have come for all your data.

------
Kiro
What are the best looking dashboards? This looks nice but I still want
something even more flashy. Usefulness is less important.

------
ikeboy
for some reason this gives a 400 error when logged in and works fine in
incognito

------
thebiglebrewski
Does anyone know how to connect a service like this to a Heroku Postgresql DB
securely and reliably?

~~~
thenaturalist
Um yeah, that is pretty easy. It's just that GDS does not support SSL for
Postgres. If you want, check out a list of BI/ data viz tools [1] I compiled
or others mentioned here in the thread.

Feel free to reach out if you have further questions.

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

~~~
palmeida
Do you accept pull requests?

~~~
thenaturalist
Yes, of course!

------
dmitriid
I wonder when they realize tat people use multiple accounts with their
services

------
ManlyBread
Just what I was looking for - more ways for giving Google my data.

------
goldfishcaura
Filter by Product: Data Studio, and the result says it all:
[https://www.google.com/analytics/success-
stories/#?modal_act...](https://www.google.com/analytics/success-
stories/#?modal_active=none&product_filters=data-studio)

"Sorry, we couldn't find any success stories to match those filters."

------
Paraesthetic
So.. powerbi by Google?

~~~
manigandham
Somewhat, there are a lot of BI SQL/visualizations/charting/dashboard services
today and this is just another alternative, but with the advantage of being
well-integrated into Google's Cloud and GSuite products if you're already
using them.

~~~
capkutay
It's funny when people complain about vendor lock-in from Oracle, IBM, other
legacy enterprise products.

Then they move everything to one of the big 3 clouds so they can use their
whole suite of services...interesting.

------
minitoar
Shameless plug: [https://demo.interana.com](https://demo.interana.com)

~~~
gravypod
Is that your company? Do they hire for remote?

~~~
minitoar
Yes, no.

~~~
borje
So which is it? Just for future reference
[http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-
yes/](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-yes/)

------
catnaroek
What advantages does this offer over doing everything on your own computer?

~~~
briffle
How long does it take you to sort a 5TB dataset on your own computer?

~~~
flukus
I've only ever done a few percent of that, but it's a lot quicker than the
eternity it would take to upload the data to google and sort it there, this is
only viable if your data is already in googles data center.

