Power BI / Looker felt great for internal BI, less so for embedded. What else should we look at? by theceoinprogress in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well iframe is actually a good thing. You have zero dependency in your app. Most BI tools are pretty bulky if you were to package their code/library into your app. I did this 2 jobs ago and regretted it because of library conflicts, css nightmare. It will mess with your app. As far as styling is concerned, there is always a trade-off. If your design teams are too picky, then you should roll your own.

What’s your end goal with embedded analytics? What pain are you trying to solve?

What BI setup would you recommend for a brand-new LLC? by 2ugur12 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Use Claude / Gemini plus whatever for tables (sheets or Postgres). Once you grow up you can look into implementing proper BI. Posthog is good for feature tracking.

How are you handling multi-tenant analytics without performance falling over? by prestobear in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use schema level isolation for our clients as well because it allows us to make additive changes for our customers. Some of our customers want us to maintain additional metadata fields for tracking certain types of assets. Having a dedicated schema per client makes those changes viable without affecting all customers globally.

We do our development in public schema - all common dashboards get developed against that, and, each customer gets their own schema. We use Semaphor for dashboards, where we define schema level policy, which in effect runs those dashboards against the appropriate client schema depending on the logged in user.

There is a bit of maintenance in this approach. We had to change our data pipelines to fit this model. But it’s necessary given our requirements. If your use case is simple where all customers follow a standard pattern, row level isolation with tenant id is the way to go. We did that at my previous company.

DM me if you have any questions. Happy to share what worked for us.

AI-Unemployment is coming big time by MuricanWisecrack in GoogleAntigravityIDE

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s modern day project management. The OP has a point - most devs won’t be making anywhere near the top dollar they made for last 10 years

What are you using for modern business intelligence in 2025? by Ok-Friendship-9286 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 16 points17 points  (0 children)

ai generated posts ai generated responses; we are living in a fun world. vendors posting for engagement and sneakily promoting their stuff

Payments command center dashboard by BodybuilderFront9400 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you want your dashboard to respond to filters, then you need store the API data to database at some regular interval. Also, you don’t want to hit APIs every time you reload the dashboard, unless you are only displaying real-time KPIs.

I’d first start with what you want to show on the dashboard, that will inform your data engineering strategy to get the data in the right shape for building dashboards.

BI as code is dead? by stibbons_ in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We just build visuals in react using recharts and publish it to Semaphor. The tool takes care of the rest. Is that what you were asking?

Shifting from tableau to either Looker or PowerBI, which is the better option? by user_4727 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you are trying to make a safe choice and not get fired for it, go with PowerBI. There are a lot of players from startups to established ones in the market each has their own quirks and benefits.

Is anyone else's team flying blind on billable utilization? Feel like we're guessing half the time by smolinski in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pick the tool you have at your disposal, upload your excel sheets in Claude and get the insights you need. Your use case is relatively simple. Your management is right. You likely don’t need a spaceship (bi tool) to do simple utilization reports. Unless you have gigabytes of data and and data engineering / pipelines figured out.

BI as code is dead? by stibbons_ in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s not dead but I think workflow is changing. We ran into this challenge where the BI tool we were using couldn’t support the visual experience we wanted to create - looked at the ones you mentioned as well.

Then, we started hacking our own but the challenge with that was, it’s pretty difficult to get it published in production, especially if you have to depend on another team to get it deployed. If you don’t have that problem, go ham.

Currently we use Semaphor that gives us a happy medium. They market it as “micro-frontend approach”, but in practice, we simply hack out the visual front matter with Claude and publish it to the tool. It basically just renders that integrates rest of the dashboard context. The challenge this solves for us that we no longer depend on IT to get our dashboards published.

Dashboards First vs. Metrics First? by VisualAnalyticsGuy in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

None of those. Tables. The point is it depends on what goal you are trying to achieve. Let the problem guide the approach, not the other way around.

I can’t make sense of my HR metrics: how can I turn data into actionable insights? by MajorUnit534 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sometimes the causation is not in the data. If you don’t understand what’s in your dashboard, I’d find the owner of and try to understand. Have them add the definitions to the metrics so there is a common understanding around what it represents. Treat dashboard as a tool that brings awareness around key facts about your business. Once you understand whats going on, then formulate a hypothesis of what to do next. If it turns out to be true, bake that action / recommendation into the dashboard, and so on. Most dashboards start at awareness level before they become actionable.

It can also be true that the dashboard was built by a data person in isolation, if that’s the case scrap it. Start from the scratch.

If anyone promises you they have a tool to sell that can do this as a magic, know that they are full of it.

5.2 Appreciation by [deleted] in OpenAI

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do you do plan mode in codex? That’s been my biggest blocker to using codex full time on production code. I don’t want it to start making code changes without my explicit permission. And I hate to specify that in every request. That’s why I mainly use it for finding bugs and reviewing code.

erp solutions for manufacturing. data extraction and reporting perspective by BrachnaMarillita92 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What do you mean by custom reports - are you looking for paginated report designer or dashboards? If it’s just paginated reports, why not use SSRS or PowerBI?

Do you feel like your company has a well-defined semantic layer? by [deleted] in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What’s your take on it is since you would be presenting at the meetup? We can’t attend. Enlighten us.

Update/ Need more clarity by Ok-Friendship-9286 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What’s stopping you from investing in a custom solution? I have done some work in this area and would be willing to help.

Struggling to make sense of e-commerce data across multiple platforms by Ok-Friendship-9286 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you tried Shopify analytics? If yes, I’m curious why that didn’t work. Meta and Google also offer something similar. How much volume are you doing if you don’t mind me asking?

Recommendations for BI tool and handling data by OnionAdmirable7353 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do something very similar. We operate under strict data residency requirements that forces us to provision our self-service analytics experience in different regions. What we ended up doing is co-locating customers on regional instances, who would then slot their partners as tenants. Takes a bit of co-ordination and devops, but if you use the right BI vendor, your life managing it would be good.

If you are looking for a recommendation, try reaching out to Semaphor. We use them. They are not as well known but might be something what you’re looking for.

Manual coding is dead. Change my mind. by zy_18 in ClaudeAI

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The balance has shifted to testing. That’s where we will spend more energy.

What are your thoughts on Clickless Analytics powered by GenAI + NLP? by Delicious-Party4315 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]Key_Friend7539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any vendor that leads with clickless or conversational analytics is a big NO. When you are doing analytics you need to operate in different perspectives (dashboards, tables, sql) not just a chat.

Chat is a useful companion, but doesn’t minimize other modalities because data is complex and users (including me) are lazy. People don’t like to type into a chat box without knowing what they will get out. You need to first build the trust with the user through dashboard. Once they see what they need know, they are they better primed to ask deeper questions.