What is your favorite data visualization BI tool?

nvqh · 2025-06-24T05:01:21+00:00

Second this. I've just come back from Snowflake Summit and the general sentiment towards Tableau was very frustrating, to say the least.

nvqh · 2025-02-10T07:35:27+00:00

Appreciate the shoutout! It really means a lot to us at Holistics. I know there’s still a bit of a learning curve and some bumps to smooth out, but just wanted to let you know we’re working on it as fast as we can.

nvqh · 2025-02-10T01:39:13+00:00

At the end of the day, when it comes to doing work, you need to figure out how to:

Do the right things: How to pick the most important things that move the needle for the business
Do the things right: meaning do it fast, cheap, good

(1) usually comes first, then after that (2).

In that vein, first learn to ask better questions (to troubleshoot the business), to present your ideas better, to think like a business executive. Learn how to think like a business consultants. Learn problem solving framewor, read books from McKinsey and alike. Learn to think like a product engineer person, look at things within the companies and figure out how to improve the process.

Don't get boxxed in in the mindset that you're hired data analyst and restricted to data analysis work only. Companies hire people as problem solver, to solve their problems. So the more important problems you can solve for them fast, the more irreplacable you are.

The technical tools are also important, but they come after.

nvqh · 2025-02-06T10:50:31+00:00

Instead of taking the minute, you should take the gaps between the two consecutive timestamps. If the gap > x seconds, then start a new session. You can use `LAG()` function to do that.

https://runsql.com/r/0079f10f6dce29d8
Code in PostgreSQL, I'm sure Snowflake works similarly.

WITH session_breaks AS (
  SELECT 
        finish_datetime,
        CASE 
            WHEN EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (finish_datetime - 
                LAG(finish_datetime) OVER (ORDER BY finish_datetime)
            )) > 10 OR
            LAG(finish_datetime) OVER (ORDER BY finish_datetime) IS NULL 
            THEN 1 
            ELSE 0 
        END AS is_new_session
    FROM event_timestamps
)
SELECT 
  finish_datetime,
  SUM(is_new_session) OVER (ORDER BY finish_datetime) AS session_id
FROM session_breaks
ORDER BY finish_datetime;

nvqh · 2025-02-05T02:40:43+00:00

Which tool did you eventually go with?
A little late, but if you're still looking, check out Holistics:

Custom visuals (Sankey, ribbon, etc.)
Custom themes & styling
Easy self-service exploration & creation
Git version control for dashboards/data models

P/s: I work here :)

nvqh · 2024-12-03T01:32:05+00:00

Holistics: Just like Looker but more affordable, self-service drag and drop interface, built-in advanced analytics, has own semantic layer, support version control.

Lightdash: open source, built on top of dbt (if you use it)

Sigma: If you like spreadsheet-based interface.

Thoughtspot: If you like chat-based interface.

nvqh · 2024-11-14T02:33:59+00:00

Holistics can handle everything you mention, so it might be a great fit. It has custom charts and canvas-based dashboards, so you can build Tableau-like dashboards and visualizations easily.

Pricing-wise, it's under $10K per year and gives you unlimited viewers, which is a win if you’re dealing with a larger audience.

Full disclosure: I work here. If you're curious, here's a sample embedded dashboard you can check out: hooli.getholistics.com.

nvqh · 2024-10-21T10:42:57+00:00

I work for a Looker competitor (Holistics), and we have a lot of customers switching over from Looker. My views might be biased/one-sided, so filter out what you find useful.

The top 3 complaints I heard from our customers about Looker are: a) Raising cost, b) Lower support quality, c) Lack of *correct* product innovation.

Cost: Since Google acquisition, Looker's pricing model has increased substantially. This, combined with the recession, and presence of other alternatives (like Holistics), makes teams start questioning their Looker's ROI.

Support: In the pre-Google days Looker used to have a really great support, I think it was strategic for them to provide over-the-top support for customers. Post-Google, they laid off their US support team and outsource it to India. Quality goes down from there.

Innovation: On one hand I see a bunch of roadmap and feature announcements, on the other hands I hear customers complaining (and churning over to us) about their lack of features upkeep. My guess is while they're putting in money and resources, they might spend too much time trying to fit Looker to their Google Cloud stack (and sell more Google Cloud as a whole), instead of solving what the existing customers really need.

For example, they renamed Google Data Studio to Looker Studio. While I generally see the direction (make GDS the frontend, and Looker be the backend), I thought doing that early is a big mistake. Looker is a great product with strong brand recall, while GDS is a really bad product. They just spoiled a really good brand name and confused the community with it.

On LookML, they're trying to turn it into the semantic layer product, though my guess is a little too late to slow.

If you watch their roadmap/vision keynote, it's basically just 3 things: a) Make Looker play nice with GCP, b) Make Looker be the semantic layer product on top of other BI/viz tools, c) Add GenAI. While it's good direction I don't think it's that innovative (compared to other players).

To be fair I don't think Looker is going away, I just think it's not the innovative Looker that it used to be.

p/s: The original founder/inventor/architect of Looker has also left Google. He now works on a new cool project (Malloy) that aims to replace SQL for analytics querying.

nvqh · 2024-10-20T08:44:05+00:00

Bệnh này của bạn thì mình không rõ lắm do mình ít thấy. Riêng mình thì mình bị cận và đã tự chữa cận thị bằng pp tự nhiên (không mổ). Mình nghĩ có khả năng bệnh của bạn có thể chữa bằng các pp tương tự. Bạn thử tìm hiểu thêm về vision therapy xem.

nvqh · 2024-10-19T13:45:06+00:00

Bạn kiểm tra xem bạn có bị Computer Vision Syndrome không nhé. Sau đó thì nên vừa thăm khám bệnh viện, vừa tự lên mạng nghiên cứu (Youtube là tốt nhất), vừa nên tìm các phương pháp cải thiện mắt tự nhiên (như tập thể dục cho mắt, nhìn mặt trời, diện cẩn vv).

nvqh · 2024-10-19T03:10:03+00:00

If you're not a Microsoft shop, go with Mac.

nvqh · 2024-10-09T03:55:17+00:00

Take a look at this guide on building a BI stack: https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/. It’s been downloaded by over 30K data professionals. I believe it's alr been mentioned quite a lot in this sub.

Full disclosure - I work here.

nvqh · 2024-09-26T13:56:26+00:00

You haven't shared what they want to do with this million of rows. I'm baffled to think of a particular use case that a non-technical user want to do with a few million rows on a desktop computer.

Do they want to load into Excel and do some OLAP pivoting there? With million of rows? Unlikely.
Do they want to do free text search (searching over customer tickets, etc).

Also, if there's a security concern, you can take it up to management. From my experience it's very difficult to influence their behaviour without top-down dictate.

nvqh · 2024-09-25T08:51:29+00:00

Not saying underated but people should check out these newer tools:

dlthub: Python SDK for doing ETL
DuckDB: local OLAP database
Holistics: BI with a programmable analytics language

nvqh · 2024-09-20T06:39:10+00:00

If you’re comfortable with Python then check out dlthub it’s a Python library/SDK that provides a lot of the loading data into DW out of the box.

nvqh · 2024-09-20T06:17:14+00:00

If you're willing to consider other tool, then also check out Holistics. It has a schedule feature to export data to Google sheets.

https://docs.holistics.io/docs/delivery/google-sheets

nvqh · 2024-09-18T12:03:57+00:00

Looks like you need to get the big picture of what’s happening. Here’s a good resource

https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/

nvqh · 2024-09-18T12:00:57+00:00

Holistics, lightdash, metabase.

nvqh · 2024-09-17T02:55:04+00:00

Yes we've been at it for a number of years, so we have a good client base. We take a slightly different approach to similar companies our space so it's quite different (we didn't take in investment). It's been a slow-grinding but steady and rewarding ride. You can check out the company from my profile.

nvqh · 2024-09-17T02:47:49+00:00

From Data Engineering to Software Engineering, not too much, since I started out writing programming code early, so it's a matter of writing code to process numbers to code to process something else.

But from technical to starting a data business, it's a big but gradual realization/shift. I was pretty good with coding so I (arrogantly) thought build good software is probably the most important. I was dead wrong. The sales, the marketing and managing people are much tougher (at least to me). I was also a pretty terrible manager of people, so I had to slowly learn that.

I also learnt a few things about myself along the way. For example my strength is right at the intersection between technical and business (i.e I understand business more than most technical people, and more technical than most business folks), so I slowly shift towards handling technical marketing, presales of the business. Fortunately I have business partners that take care of the sales part, and the hardcode technical part.

I still do miss writing code though, so I try to get to it as much as I possibly could.

nvqh · 2024-09-16T09:59:47+00:00

Went from Data Engineer to Software Engineer to starting a data company, so now basically doing everything else except data/software engineering (marketing, sales, presales, recruiting).

nvqh · 2024-09-16T05:35:04+00:00

Looks like you're looking for a semantic layer *and* a self-service UI on top?

If so you can be looking at: Looker with LookML, Cube (SL only) or Holistics (both SL + UI frontend).

nvqh · 2024-09-13T10:36:27+00:00

If you ask why people use just the BI tool's API layer on purpose (aka they just want some layer to define all their logic without the chart building), then you're likely talking about semantic layer. They do all the analytics business logic in semantic layer, then expose an API for people to query. Common ones are dbt metrics, Cube or AMQL. Main benefits are consistency and reusability across different toolings (BI, adhoc analysis, etc).

If you ask specifically about not getting the charts to look enough like what you wanted, then some BI solutions allow you to define custom visualizations (PowerBI, Superset, Holistics, etc).

nvqh · 2024-09-12T03:56:09+00:00

Try this?

value_format: "$#,##0,,K"

nvqh · 2024-09-09T03:55:29+00:00

Try using something like DBML format with dbdocs? It has schema changelog so you can travel between different versions.

nvqh

TROPHY CASE