
Ask HN: Tool for getting meaningful data out of database quickly - rntksi
I work in a medium entreprise that does not have a dedicated data analysis team.<p>I have a workflow that comes in every week or so, which would be someone high-ranking asking for such and such data, by this and that range of months, with this and that kind of attributes.<p>We have 3 SQL database (2 PostgreSQL, 1 old Oracle), and usually this involves me opening up my SQL program, writing out the query by hand, and then exporting it.<p>Sometimes the demand would involve a lot of tables that are scattered.<p>I have DataGrip which helps me, but I want something better.<p>I know in my head how it all works, but I would like to know if there is something on the market that lets me:<p>- Assign meaning to all the relationships of tables;<p>- Query visually by telling it (e.g.) &quot;all drugs dispensed&quot; after that it knows what &quot;all drugs&quot; means and &quot;dispensed&quot; means; and<p>- Quickly export to Google Drive or similar share-able avenues.<p>I can of course write SQLs, but after a while it gets very tedious. I have so many views&#x2F;functions that I built up to be ready for all the demands but sometimes it gets counter-intuitive.<p>Do you know of a tool that helps me with this? I&#x27;ve tried these following tools but they seem to pitch for different business use-cases (most seem to pitch for business people who want charts, I don&#x27;t want charts, I just want my Excel files).<p>- Google Data Studio.<p>- Microsoft PowerBI.<p>- Mode.<p>- Klipfolio.
======
bradknowles
Sounds to me like you want data warehousing/Online Analytics Processing tools,
but you don’t have a DW/OLAP environment.

I’m not sure what kind of tools you could bolt onto SQL databases to make them
more useful in this kind of context.

You might be better off exporting all your data on a regular basis to real DW
databases and then using their tooling.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any better answers for you.

------
mackle_hair
hey - i evaluated a bunch of tools like mode and google data studio as well
trying to solve this exact problem, but i could never find what i was looking
for...

so we built structure to solve this - it's a sql editor like datagrip but it
allows you to build datasets that you can reuse for new analysis. so, in your
case you define your relationships once with SQL, in this case 'all drugs',
and then you can build a model 'all drugs dispensed' that reuses the 'all
drugs' dataset... and the views / tables are linked and organized so you dont
have to recreate them every time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tmeFgWMLs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tmeFgWMLs)

it doesn't solve the problem of your data being scattered across multiple
databases (you can send your data to a data warehouse with tools like
fivetran), or an export to google drive - but it does solve the hard problem
of keeping your analytics organized in a sane way so you dont have to rebuild
the same sql queries over and over again, or have a bunch of various SQL
definitions of the same thing.

------
eyeball
You can use qlik to basically build your own reporting warehouse as extracted
data files in their QVD format.

[https://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlik-
sense](https://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlik-sense)

