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Something that we use at my job is Looker (https://looker.com/ https://looker.com/). While it's not open-source or free, I didn't know about the product until I

Something that we use at my job is Looker (https://looker.com/ https://looker.com/). While it's not open-source or free, I didn't know about the product until I joined and I love their features for data visualization and running ad-hoc queries. We just set a read-only user named 'looker' and its good to go. :) Disclaimer: I'm not a Looker employee or anything, just a happy user of their product.

thenaturalist 10y ago
Hey, we're thinking about switching our reporting to Looker. Would you mind sharing your impressions of the tool and maybe how your daily workflow roughly looks like? You can shoot me an email via jankyri.com (link at the bottom).
- teej 10y ago
  If you're at the point where you have the need and the budget for a business intelligence tool, Looker is fantastic. Anyone who can pivot in Excel will pick up Looker quickly and be able to get actionable insights.
- viiralvx 10y ago
  Hey there! I am not on the Data Engineering team, I'm just a regular ol' Software Engineer who likes making data visualizations for fun. But I do know that a lot of the people on the Data Engineering team enjoy using Looker primarily because you can do so many things with it and make it interactive. They even setup some nice things such as User Projections, revenue projections, etc. And it's easily interactive. Also, it's easy to auto-generate reports to be sent to stakeholders, complete with charts and visualizations when necessary. Nothing but good impressions on my end here.
numlocked 10y ago
(SQL Explorer author here) We actually use Looker as well internally. It's a great tool. When we were smaller, Explorer fit our needs really well (I should hope so - since I specifically wrote it for us), but as we got bigger (~40 employees now) it's harder to manage a large number of reports, and we started getting a bit of a backlog of "please add field x to report y" engineering tickets. Looker has been a great solution to allow people to self-serve even more. We still use the heck out of SQL Explorer as well, but Looker adds a ton of additional value (though notably, is not terribly cheap).

thenaturalist 10y ago

Hey, we're thinking about switching our reporting to Looker. Would you mind sharing your impressions of the tool and maybe how your daily workflow roughly looks like? You can shoot me an email via jankyri.com (link at the bottom).

teej 10y ago
If you're at the point where you have the need and the budget for a business intelligence tool, Looker is fantastic. Anyone who can pivot in Excel will pick up Looker quickly and be able to get actionable insights.
viiralvx 10y ago
Hey there! I am not on the Data Engineering team, I'm just a regular ol' Software Engineer who likes making data visualizations for fun. But I do know that a lot of the people on the Data Engineering team enjoy using Looker primarily because you can do so many things with it and make it interactive. They even setup some nice things such as User Projections, revenue projections, etc. And it's easily interactive. Also, it's easy to auto-generate reports to be sent to stakeholders, complete with charts and visualizations when necessary. Nothing but good impressions on my end here.

numlocked 10y ago

(SQL Explorer author here) We actually use Looker as well internally. It's a great tool. When we were smaller, Explorer fit our needs really well (I should hope so - since I specifically wrote it for us), but as we got bigger (~40 employees now) it's harder to manage a large number of reports, and we started getting a bit of a backlog of "please add field x to report y" engineering tickets. Looker has been a great solution to allow people to self-serve even more. We still use the heck out of SQL Explorer as well, but Looker adds a ton of additional value (though notably, is not terribly cheap).