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Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

davb 10y ago
Redash is fantastic. Things like scheduled queries just work, and the AMI is a great way to get up and running quickly. The docs are decent and the upgrade script works well. I also really appreciated the (optional) Login with Google feature and the ability to limit it to certain email domains (we use Google Apps, so it worked really well). We've been trialling it casually in our engineering and data science teams. However, the latest version is a little rough around the edges. Bugs like this one https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520 https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520 (can't delete users, even at the CLI) and this one https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-disable-delete-a-user https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-dis... (there's no option to delete a user in the admin UI, requested since September 2015) make fall just short of production-ready.
- arikfr 10y ago
  (Redash author here) I was really hoping to address this in the upcoming v1.0.0 release, but eventually didn't want to delay it as it was in the oven for too long anyway. It will probably be addressed in the release after. Beside the ability to delete a user have you experienced other rough edges in the recent releases? We strive to improve the stability and reduce the rough edges with every release, so really want to hear about your experience.
  - davb 10y ago
    Hey thanks for replying. We noticed a couple of UI irregularities (for example when editing charts the contents or axis labels would disappear). Unfortunately I don't have anything more specific for you right now. I did notice when deleting users it seems that they (and their dependent db objects) actually deleted from the database (rather than flagged as deleted) - for traceability it would be great if they weren't removed altogether. Though to balance things, let me tell you what we loved about Redash. The user/group/source model is really nice - I appreciated being able to give only our admin group users access to a data source configured with our database master user credentials. The Google OAUTH functionality (and really clear documentation around this) and pre-rolled AMI were a huge plus, allowing me to get our team up and running really quickly. The same goes for the Lets Encrypt instructions (we all use certbot regularly but no-one had to dig through Redash's config files blind - the docs were spot on). The ability to fork queries - superb. Data export was also fantastic.
vitorbaptistaa 10y ago
We've been using it on a project to aggregate clinical trial data from many different sources (https://opentrials.net https://opentrials.net) and it has been great! It allows researchers (not necessarily devs, usually medical doctors) to peek our raw data, and it's a great excuse for them to learn at least the basics of SQL. The response has been great. We also use it to do some small data checks on the data quality, with alerts sent to our Slack. Highly recommended.
- arikfr 10y ago
  Thank you for proving it's not only for "tech people", and that "normals" can pass the SQL barrier too :) (and learn a useful skill on the way)
spapas82 10y ago
Hello, it seems that there are no instructions on step-by-step installing redash in your own server. The only thing I could find was info on how to install it on AWS or using docker (https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-instance.html https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-ins...). However I want to install it normally, using my server's nginx / postgresql / python / supervisorctl etc. Can it be done? Can you provide some step by step instructions ? Thanks !
- mbaird 10y ago
  At the top of the setup guide is a link to a provisioning script which might help: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/setup/ubuntu/bootstrap.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/se...
  - spapas82 10y ago
    Thanks! Yes this file could be used to see the compoments needed to install redash. However I'd really prefer some complete step-by-step instructions to actually understand better what's going on. For example similar to the instructions gitlab provides for installing in your server (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/installation.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...)
- arikfr 10y ago
  (Redash author) Step by step instructions could be great, but there is that much time in the day, so figured that anyone who wants to customize the deployment, will know how do it on his own (or use the bootstrap script for reference). I'll be happy to answer questions on how to set it up in your environment, you're welcome to the forum[1], Gitter[2] or Slack[3]. [1] https://discuss.redash.io https://discuss.redash.io [2] https://gitter.im/getredash/redash https://gitter.im/getredash/redash [3] https://slack.redash.io https://slack.redash.io
  - spapas82 10y ago
    Thank you very much! I'll try using the bootstrap script and come to slack if I encounter difficulties. Best regards!
Signez 10y ago
Looks great! What about open-sourced Superset[1] from AirBnB? Both looks great, but Superset seems to have a superset of Redash features (bad pun intended). [1]: https://github.com/airbnb/superset https://github.com/airbnb/superset
- CalRobert 10y ago
  We used both, and ended up going with Superset for internal dashboards and data exploration. Redash is more polished to look at, but Superset offers more functionality. However, some things are still rough around the edges; I get occasional 500's during normal navigation, and the filtering options are immature, using only "IN" or "NOT IN" (you have to say things like "field not in FALSE", etc.) Still, though, quite powerful, and we hope to push some improvements upstream in relation to my comments here.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  Metabase is another great open-source tool: http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/
  - hopeless 10y ago
    Metabase is my new favourite tool: I've probably use it every day to answer some question instead of dropping into the Rails console. Things like: what percentage of orders come from Stripe vs Paypal? Or export a list of users that match this criteria. Or display the top 10 users by some metric. It makes creating BI charts from a database easy enough that a non-developer can do it. But when the going gets tough, I can still drop down to hand-coded SQL. It was also an easy installation on Heroku. It's not entirely perfect (combining multiple series on one chart is harder than it needs to be; can only pull data from databases not APIs) but it's been a success so far
    - tlrobinson 10y ago
      Hey I work on Metabase, thanks for the kind words and feedback. Regarding pulling data from APIs, there's nothing inherently stopping us (or you) from pulling data from APIs (in fact that's what the Google Analytics driver does). Are you looking for integrations with specific 3rd party APIs, or an easier way to integrate with your own APIs? Feel free to respond here, email me, or file a GitHub issue. Thanks.
CalRobert 10y ago
Redash is handy, especially if you want to go from "I have a DB of events" to "here's some handy dashboards" in just a few minutes. Its filtering options were a little limited, at least as of November (you can't inject anything in to the "where" part of a query).
- arikfr 10y ago
  Re. filtering: do you mean something like parameters? Because that's supported.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    Not exactly. Say I have a table with one row per user and want users for a given country. I could say SELECT country_code AS country_code::multi-filter, count(1) AS users FROM mytable GROUP BY country_code; And I will indeed get a dropdown with country codes. But, the query is still running for all countries (and if I'm not mistaken all the filtering is on the client). For something more complex, like number of users from a country with spend over a certain amount, I want something like: SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users FROM mytable WHERE lifetime_spend > {Value from a superset dropdown} GROUP BY country_code I could do something like SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users, lifetime_spend from ..... and then filter on the Redash side, I suppose, but that will be slower and have to deal with a lot of data I don't care about. Has something like this been added in the last few months? Also, Redash generally seemed to be based around the idea that you would write SQL with a few parameters in the SELECT statement and users would be content with that (which of course is true for many use cases!) We wanted to be able to add a table to Redash/Superset/Metabase/whatever and have someone who doesn't know SQL gain some insights quickly. For instance, distinct users in the last week on a given platform from a set of access logs. Still though, I meant what I said - I had Redash up and hooked to our DB with useful charts in about 5 minutes, which was spectacular. As time went on though we realized that a lot of people could answer their questions in Superset without asking someone else to write SQL, while Redash required someone to write a query. Superset is definitely the less mature and polished product, though, perhaps due to its ambition!
ing33k 10y ago
Also check out Zeppelin : "A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more." https://zeppelin.apache.org/ https://zeppelin.apache.org/
estsauver 10y ago
We use Redash via (https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/) for a truly hideous amount of stuff at our startup. We use it for almost every operations dashboard, and we've also prototyped out a task allocation and field agent management tool using them and Zapier. They're really great, I'd highly recommend them to anyone.
- arikfr 10y ago
  Thanks <3. Always enjoy seeing what Eli does with Redash & Zapier. Really looking forward for when the Zapier integration becomes official and goes into their directory.
arikfr 10y ago
Hi! I'm the author of Redash :) Nice to see Redash at the top of HN. I'll be happy to answer any questions about Redash, open source and about my journey to make Redash a self sustainable project. For any questions that don't fit on HN, feel free to reach me at arik at redash.io.
- mansigandhi 10y ago
  We LOVE REDASH at our company. Lack of adequate developers (the neverending startup saga) meant not everyone got what they wanted, fast enough. Redash has changed that for us. We use it extensively across all our teams (operations, sales, marketing etc). Thanks!
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- antoineaugusti 10y ago
  Thanks for your amazing work Arik and for keeping Redash open source. We <3 you
- flaviuspopan 10y ago
  Hi Arik, Quick question: to what decimal accuracy are the visualizations capable of displaying, and are second/sub-second time series possible in the dashboards? The issue our team has been having with other platforms such as Quicksight is the lack of support for extremely granular data visualization. Thanks in advance!
lolive 10y ago
Are some public datasets available directly as SQL endpoints? I know the Semantic Web provides some public datasets as SPARQL endpoints. But I have never heard of an equivalent for SQL.
- fhoffa 10y ago
  How about the BigQuery ones? http://demo.redash.io/ http://demo.redash.io/ works great with BigQuery.
yalooze 10y ago
Reminds me of Blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer
torkale 10y ago
This is awesome!
j_s 10y ago
Ask HN: Is there any open source BI tool that is always first on the list when the conversation finally gets to "Oh, you're on the Windows/Microsoft stack? Then you're probably going to wind up using _______"
- numbsafari 10y ago
  Have you tried using the growing support for docker and Linux running under windows? I haven't, personally. Just curious if others have.
- sixdimensional 10y ago
  I think part of the reason this happens is Java has wider support out of the box for most data sources via JDBC than Windows has with ODBC/ADO.NET. I mean, it's a close race, but most new open source databases have Java/JDBC drivers first and then ODBC second, for example. I think this may change a little with .NET being opened and cross platform, but it might take a while. Of course you can make Java/JDBC connections from Windows to databases but many users somehow find it more difficult and I've noticed an annoying trend among large enterprises running Windows on the desktop to not want to support Java/JDBC tools on the desktop, unless they are invested in it.
  - j_s 10y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'm not unstanding why you mentioned Java/JDBC, I'm not aware of any of the mentioned tools (redash,superset,blazer; turns out metabase uses Clojure) using Java. Only redash doesn't list SQL Server support. What am I missing?
    - sixdimensional 10y ago
      Well, I meant in the general context of database connectivity. The underlying database connectivity plumbing is almost always a JDBC or ODBC interface when you're talking a regular DBMS [1]. Historically, ODBC was not always as popular on Linux (being a Microsoft standard originally), although that has changed a lot by today. JDBC was usually more associated to open source/Linux BI/database tools (Java being open source in origin itself), which is why for a while, you could connect to more data sources with JDBC drivers/interfaces than ODBC. Writing a JDBC driver is also many times less complicated than writing an ODBC driver. The ODBC spec is old and complicated.. JDBC is still difficult but much less complicated. Most programming languages can get to either a JDBC or ODBC driver via some mechanism, on pretty much any platform. So today I guess it's hard to say that it matters (ideally it shouldn't), I was just giving my personal take on the historical context that lead to the comment you made - "why doesn't this run in the Microsoft stack?". All of the tools mentioned (redash, superset, blazer) are relying on the underlying interfaces in ODBC / JDBC for regular databases. If the system is running on Unix and accessing ODBC, it is almost guaranteed to be using UnixODBC to be doing so. Any tool like this (I don't know the internal-specifics of these tools) would probably have built a layer in to abstract away the low-level interface into some mechanism that hopefully makes the use of JDBC or ODBC (or any interface) irrelevant. That's a lot harder than it seems on the face of it. I used to work for a company that made a product that connected / federated data from "any" platform - which is partly what influences my opinion of how difficult it is to wrangle all these interfaces at lower-levels. EDIT: I think the crux of what I'm saying is, the reason you don't have a tool that pops up when you ask that question is, because of OS platform differences, with Linux/open source usually being the first priority over Windows historically. [1] Some DBMS provide native web services connectivity which obviates the need for JDBC/ODBC completely.. which is kind of nice.
overcast 10y ago
How does the externally hosted version connect to databases?
- arikfr 10y ago
  (Redash author) You will need to allow access from our servers to your database. It's obviously a security concern, but we take great measures to ensure the safety of your data. If that's not an option, you can always run Redash self hosted.
kamranjon 10y ago
I was working for a company that relied heavily on Wagon - and then it got bought by Box and they shutdown the product. We looked for alternatives but nothing seemed to offer what Wagon had - this looks like it might be a good fit though. Excited to try it out.
- seppemans 10y ago
  You should also check out DataMill (http://www.datamillapp.com http://www.datamillapp.com), it's quite similar to what Wagon offered. Installed as an app, context-aware SQL autocomplete and built-in charting. It's in public beta - give it a try :-) (DataMill author)
notdonspaulding 10y ago
We're hosting on our own EC2 instance using the docker image. Setup was mostly smooth. We love the integration with Google Apps so our entire organization automatically has access. We primarily use it to connect to Amazon's Redshift and pull some data out for quick visual analysis. It's a very good combo. We're at the early stages of using it but it seems like a very solid product. Kudos to the dev!
tdelmas 10y ago
I didn't find 'The Art Of Computer Programming' by Donald Knuth... Must be a mistake.
etatkomoona 10y ago
Redash is great. We've tried several alternatives, including Metabase, and ended up with extensive Redash use. We use the self-hosted version for sharing data between the tech and business sides, for day-to-day monitoring and for ad-hoc visualizations, and are generally very happy with it. It's not perfect - there are some areas, like fine-control over chart customization, query auto-updates (especially queries with parameters) and the ability to queue parallel queries to the same data source which would be nice improvements, but these are nitpicks - highly recommended.
- arikfr 10y ago
  > queue parallel queries to the same data source That's definitely possible. You might need to tune the number of workers you have to run queries (and maybe adjust your database settings, if it has limits on concurrency). If you need help with this, you're welcome to the forum[1], Gitter[2] or Slack[3]. [1] https://discuss.redash.io https://discuss.redash.io [2] https://gitter.im/getredash/redash https://gitter.im/getredash/redash [3] https://slack.redash.io https://slack.redash.io
- marrone12 10y ago
  I've been looking at metabase myself. What were your main issues with it?
  - etatkomoona 10y ago
    The main issue for us was support of JOINs (note that this was a while ago, not sure what's the status now; I did find this relatively recent discussion, though [1]) [1] http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins
gk1 10y ago
I'm a marketing consultant and Redash has worked its way into my preferred stack for analytics: Segment + Redshift + Redash. It replaces event- and user-tracking tools like Mixpanel, Heap, Woopra, and others. Those are just UI layers on top of SQL queries. If you or your marketers know (or can learn) even basic SQL then Redash is what you want.
xtracto 10y ago
I tried Redash some time ago while I was looking for a very simple "BI" like tool that our non-technical or low-technical colleagues could use (people in Client Satisfaction team). I settled for Metabase (http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/ , https://github.com/metabase/metabase https://github.com/metabase/metabase ), mainly for the ease of use and installation (a simple java -jar metabase.jar does the trick). Redash was a close second (one advantage at that time was the ability to have users that could only read queries), but after fighting with it for a while in order to install it, I tested Metabase and haven't looked back since.
- arikfr 10y ago
  (Redash author) Having a single executable is definitely the best, and I wish we had one for Readsh... trying to compensate on this with the Docker and cloud (AWS / GCE) images for easy setup.
  - foodabytes 10y ago
    How about bitnami? They provide Redash virtual machines and installers already?
    - the_common_man 10y ago
      Or a cloudron app.
- salsakran 10y ago
  I'm one of the Metabase team, and for what it's worth, we support read-only users now!
  - xtracto 10y ago
    Kind of... I mean, we use it very heavily in my current company. And we are always looking forward for a new release. What you cannot do right now (v0.22.0) is let some people see cards but not create "new questions". I know the current release being developed is tackling something akin to "published dashboards", so I am very happy. Btw, great work! you cannot imagine how happy Metabase made both our Devs (we didn't have the bandwidth to program dashboards or setup something more demanding) and our non-techs who were super excited to learn SQL and now have some impressive dashboards in Metabase. This is some shit we would be willing to pay for.
Maarius 10y ago
For those of you looking for a another fully hosted solution, check out https://www.cluvio.com https://www.cluvio.com (full disclosure: I am one of the founders). Like redash, Cluvio allows you to run SQL queries against your database and quickly visualize results as beautiful, interactive dashboards, which can easily be shared within your company or externally. We developed our own custom grammar on top of SQL which makes writing time-range related queries a lot easier and allows to parametrize queries, which powers the dashboard interactivity. We also allow to run custom R script on top of the SQL results, have SQL Alerts that run at specified schedules, allow you to create SQL Snippets and offer a free entry plan. Currently supported datasources are Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MariaDB and Amazon Aurora.
- erlend_sh 10y ago
  Hey Maarius, thanks for chiming in! I've had my eye on Cluvio for a while so I was gonna drop it in here to ask how the two compare. For me, an open source core is a huge gesture of trust though. It's the ultimate "no lock-in strategy" guarantee. This business model has been proven sustainable by several SAAS companies, such as Automattic (WordPress.com), Discourse (which I work for), Sentry, Piwik and hopefully Redash well! Any chance Cluvio will consider going down this path too?
  - arikfr 10y ago
    At the moment (and I hope to keep it this way), it's not only the core of Redash that is open source -- it's the whole product. There are a few features that are introduced on the hosted version first, for ease of development. But most of it goes to the open source first. As we (Redash) use Discourse as well, it will be only fitting, to have Discourse use Redash :-) (btw, Sentry are Redash users as well[1]) Feel free to ping me (arik at redash.io). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631
  - Maarius 10y ago
    Good question! Our aim is to build the best cloud BI platform for SMEs and we currently don't plan to open source Cluvio. However, we do offer a "free forever" plan that allows you to use our platform for free, indefinitely.
vaidik 10y ago
We have been using Redash at our company for almost a year now. Every single release just proves how promising the project is. You can make useful dashboards in minutes. Support for multiple databases is amazing. We are using it with multiple PostgreSQLs, Redshift, MongoDB and InfluxDB. The most valuable feature is alerts though. I work at an ecommerce and operations heavy company where we have tons of connected components. Where alerts come really handy for us is that anyone in the organization can add quick alerts for proactive monitoring of events recorded in on-field ops and act when things go bad. This almost like building a feature on one of the internal tools, just doing that yourself without any engineering support. This comes in really handy. Kudos to the team! Looking forward to some more amazing stuff in Redash!
_joel 10y ago
Do any of the dashboards mentioned support exporting to a report?
- arikfr 10y ago
  You mean as a PDF or email?
  - _joel 10y ago
    Yes, essentially. An export to a file on a given time period would be fine, can deal with the format conversion etc myself. I'm thinking of sending arbitrary reports to management without the need for Jasper etc.
    - abhirama 10y ago
      We are currently working on solving this exact same problem, developer friendly report automation sans visualization. We are entirely focused on solving the reporting problem before tacking visualisation etc. If you are interested in trying out our product, please send me an email at abhyrama at google email service and I will send you the instructions to try it out. The product is out and is being piloted in two large startups which have seen tremendous efficiency improvements in their whole reporting process. We are yet to bring the product public website up.
    - arikfr 10y ago
      Exports to CSV or Excel are already available. In future releases we will add support for full reports with visualizations and everything. It's actually already possible with some scripting and our API, but I want to add it into the product itself.
      - sixdimensional 10y ago
        Also, publish data set as a web service dataset, and now you're into the features offered by "data virtualization" software vendors / tools (things like Teiid or Denodo, for example).
huy 10y ago
I really like Redash, it’s one of the early tools that introduce this concept of turn SQL into chart to developers, and also teach developers to learn and write better SQL, altogether without any cost. I evaluated Redash during my past company back in 2013 (we were also using Tableau), but due to some Redash’s lack of features (no support for filters, lack of permission control, sporadic performance), we went and build something inhouse with similar approach (turn SQL into charts). And inspired by the same path Redash founder took, that internal project turned into a startup by itself. We’re relatively new but getting good momentum. Some of our customers went with us after evaluating both. While we don’t have a self-hosted open-source version, our pricing only starts at 49$/mo for up to 5 users (pretty affordable for startups IMHO). You can check it out here: https://www.holistics.io https://www.holistics.io
- aceregen 10y ago
  Hello! Redash is great if you are looking to host it in-house and have the engineering resources to set-up and maintain it. If you are looking for an affordable SaaS alternative, you may want to look into Holistics (www.holistics.io). (Note I'm the other co-founder here with huy) Besides supporting native SQL, Holistics is designed to address the gaps of SQL for common business reporting use-cases (flexible way of passing user inputs as parameters into report query; supporting if-else capabilities in SQL, reusable query templates and records/columns based access control for users/user groups). This makes it easier to manage and reduce the management of duplicate SQL query syntax across multiple reports/dashboards (especially multiple UNIONS/Case-Ifs statements). We also have our own DSL for you to configure in more details how certain charts should look like (beyond the normal coloring). A common problem we also see is that most data-related work is not just visualization, mainly for the reason that most data are not structured/formatted in the right table structure as most companies start off without a data warehouse. While most query tools requires customers to work with a separate ETL/warehousing tool, we’ve built an integrated approach towards data reporting and data preparation. Insights from our data reporting module (reports with expensive joins, long query times, non-optimal table structures) provides your data analyst inputs to easily move, map records, and transform data without technical engineering knowledge. Data in Google Sheets or CSVs with their data sync automatically (incrementally or full) to their database. And all this is done with the data not leaving our customers’ database (we don’t warehouse their data. Our data reporting module works directly with your database, and our data preparation module provides just the utilities (not infrastructure) to automate your data pipeline process. Do take some time to check us out! Quote HN and we give you an additional one day of free trial! :P
uberneo 10y ago
Added the missing Teradata support as the source (kind of) - https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-support/83/16 https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-support/83/... Waiting to resolve few more -- 1) Functionality for CSV/XLS file import , like in Tableau . Some discussion on - https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-source/216/5 https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-source/216/5 2) Functionality to select "ALL" in filters 3) Functionality to merge data from multiple data source. I know it does exists in Paid version but waiting for it come in Opensource version.
ehfeng 10y ago
We use Redash at Sentry and it's become critical for marketing, sales, even engineering. Open source ftw!
kornish 10y ago
Great work! A quick question: what differentiates Redash from Chart.io, Periscope, or existing SQL-and-visualization BI tools?
actuator 10y ago
Thanks, @arikfr for the project. We started using redash about 2 years back. We use it for ad-hoc SQL to Redshift and MySQL and most of our business level KPI dashboards are there. One thing I would want to do is add some metabase like segmentation there(preferably that works with joins), so that marketing/sales people can also actively query from it.
fudged71 10y ago
For data visualization I recently switched from SQL+Excel to Tableau, and I'm never going back.
- teej 10y ago
  My qualms with Tableau is that they've moved excruciating slowly on MacOS support and that getting started from scratch seemed like a major development effort. We evaluated Tableau against Looker and are now very happy customers of the latter for a year+.
Jonovono 10y ago
After trying pretty much every BI tool we went with http://modeanalytics.com/ http://modeanalytics.com/ and have been pretty happy!
mmonihan 10y ago
Has anyone prioritized adding the ability to modify the HTML of the report the way ModeAnalytics.com does? I frequently want to map the data directly to highcharts.js when the UI can't get me to the result I want.

davb 10y ago

Redash is fantastic. Things like scheduled queries just work, and the AMI is a great way to get up and running quickly. The docs are decent and the upgrade script works well. I also really appreciated the (optional) Login with Google feature and the ability to limit it to certain email domains (we use Google Apps, so it worked really well). We've been trialling it casually in our engineering and data science teams. However, the latest version is a little rough around the edges. Bugs like this one https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520 https://github.com/getredash/redash/issues/1520 (can't delete users, even at the CLI) and this one https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-disable-delete-a-user https://trello.com/c/6siqvcxh/39-admin-should-be-able-to-dis... (there's no option to delete a user in the admin UI, requested since September 2015) make fall just short of production-ready.

arikfr 10y ago
(Redash author here) I was really hoping to address this in the upcoming v1.0.0 release, but eventually didn't want to delay it as it was in the oven for too long anyway. It will probably be addressed in the release after. Beside the ability to delete a user have you experienced other rough edges in the recent releases? We strive to improve the stability and reduce the rough edges with every release, so really want to hear about your experience.
- davb 10y ago
  Hey thanks for replying. We noticed a couple of UI irregularities (for example when editing charts the contents or axis labels would disappear). Unfortunately I don't have anything more specific for you right now. I did notice when deleting users it seems that they (and their dependent db objects) actually deleted from the database (rather than flagged as deleted) - for traceability it would be great if they weren't removed altogether. Though to balance things, let me tell you what we loved about Redash. The user/group/source model is really nice - I appreciated being able to give only our admin group users access to a data source configured with our database master user credentials. The Google OAUTH functionality (and really clear documentation around this) and pre-rolled AMI were a huge plus, allowing me to get our team up and running really quickly. The same goes for the Lets Encrypt instructions (we all use certbot regularly but no-one had to dig through Redash's config files blind - the docs were spot on). The ability to fork queries - superb. Data export was also fantastic.

vitorbaptistaa 10y ago

We've been using it on a project to aggregate clinical trial data from many different sources (https://opentrials.net https://opentrials.net) and it has been great! It allows researchers (not necessarily devs, usually medical doctors) to peek our raw data, and it's a great excuse for them to learn at least the basics of SQL. The response has been great. We also use it to do some small data checks on the data quality, with alerts sent to our Slack. Highly recommended.

arikfr 10y ago
Thank you for proving it's not only for "tech people", and that "normals" can pass the SQL barrier too :) (and learn a useful skill on the way)

spapas82 10y ago

Hello, it seems that there are no instructions on step-by-step installing redash in your own server. The only thing I could find was info on how to install it on AWS or using docker (https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-instance.html https://redash.io/help-onpremise/setup/setting-up-redash-ins...). However I want to install it normally, using my server's nginx / postgresql / python / supervisorctl etc. Can it be done? Can you provide some step by step instructions ? Thanks !

mbaird 10y ago
At the top of the setup guide is a link to a provisioning script which might help: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/setup/ubuntu/bootstrap.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/se...
- spapas82 10y ago
  Thanks! Yes this file could be used to see the compoments needed to install redash. However I'd really prefer some complete step-by-step instructions to actually understand better what's going on. For example similar to the instructions gitlab provides for installing in your server (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/installation.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...)
arikfr 10y ago
(Redash author) Step by step instructions could be great, but there is that much time in the day, so figured that anyone who wants to customize the deployment, will know how do it on his own (or use the bootstrap script for reference). I'll be happy to answer questions on how to set it up in your environment, you're welcome to the forum[1], Gitter[2] or Slack[3]. [1] https://discuss.redash.io https://discuss.redash.io [2] https://gitter.im/getredash/redash https://gitter.im/getredash/redash [3] https://slack.redash.io https://slack.redash.io
- spapas82 10y ago
  Thank you very much! I'll try using the bootstrap script and come to slack if I encounter difficulties. Best regards!

Signez 10y ago

Looks great! What about open-sourced Superset[1] from AirBnB? Both looks great, but Superset seems to have a superset of Redash features (bad pun intended). [1]: https://github.com/airbnb/superset https://github.com/airbnb/superset

CalRobert 10y ago
We used both, and ended up going with Superset for internal dashboards and data exploration. Redash is more polished to look at, but Superset offers more functionality. However, some things are still rough around the edges; I get occasional 500's during normal navigation, and the filtering options are immature, using only "IN" or "NOT IN" (you have to say things like "field not in FALSE", etc.) Still, though, quite powerful, and we hope to push some improvements upstream in relation to my comments here.
nileshtrivedi 10y ago
Metabase is another great open-source tool: http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/
- hopeless 10y ago
  Metabase is my new favourite tool: I've probably use it every day to answer some question instead of dropping into the Rails console. Things like: what percentage of orders come from Stripe vs Paypal? Or export a list of users that match this criteria. Or display the top 10 users by some metric. It makes creating BI charts from a database easy enough that a non-developer can do it. But when the going gets tough, I can still drop down to hand-coded SQL. It was also an easy installation on Heroku. It's not entirely perfect (combining multiple series on one chart is harder than it needs to be; can only pull data from databases not APIs) but it's been a success so far
  - tlrobinson 10y ago
    Hey I work on Metabase, thanks for the kind words and feedback. Regarding pulling data from APIs, there's nothing inherently stopping us (or you) from pulling data from APIs (in fact that's what the Google Analytics driver does). Are you looking for integrations with specific 3rd party APIs, or an easier way to integrate with your own APIs? Feel free to respond here, email me, or file a GitHub issue. Thanks.

CalRobert 10y ago

Redash is handy, especially if you want to go from "I have a DB of events" to "here's some handy dashboards" in just a few minutes. Its filtering options were a little limited, at least as of November (you can't inject anything in to the "where" part of a query).

arikfr 10y ago
Re. filtering: do you mean something like parameters? Because that's supported.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Not exactly. Say I have a table with one row per user and want users for a given country. I could say SELECT country_code AS country_code::multi-filter, count(1) AS users FROM mytable GROUP BY country_code; And I will indeed get a dropdown with country codes. But, the query is still running for all countries (and if I'm not mistaken all the filtering is on the client). For something more complex, like number of users from a country with spend over a certain amount, I want something like: SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users FROM mytable WHERE lifetime_spend > {Value from a superset dropdown} GROUP BY country_code I could do something like SELECT country_code AS "cc::filter", COUNT(1) as num_users, lifetime_spend from ..... and then filter on the Redash side, I suppose, but that will be slower and have to deal with a lot of data I don't care about. Has something like this been added in the last few months? Also, Redash generally seemed to be based around the idea that you would write SQL with a few parameters in the SELECT statement and users would be content with that (which of course is true for many use cases!) We wanted to be able to add a table to Redash/Superset/Metabase/whatever and have someone who doesn't know SQL gain some insights quickly. For instance, distinct users in the last week on a given platform from a set of access logs. Still though, I meant what I said - I had Redash up and hooked to our DB with useful charts in about 5 minutes, which was spectacular. As time went on though we realized that a lot of people could answer their questions in Superset without asking someone else to write SQL, while Redash required someone to write a query. Superset is definitely the less mature and polished product, though, perhaps due to its ambition!

ing33k 10y ago

Also check out Zeppelin : "A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more." https://zeppelin.apache.org/ https://zeppelin.apache.org/

estsauver 10y ago

We use Redash via (https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/) for a truly hideous amount of stuff at our startup. We use it for almost every operations dashboard, and we've also prototyped out a task allocation and field agent management tool using them and Zapier. They're really great, I'd highly recommend them to anyone.

arikfr 10y ago
Thanks <3. Always enjoy seeing what Eli does with Redash & Zapier. Really looking forward for when the Zapier integration becomes official and goes into their directory.

arikfr 10y ago

Hi! I'm the author of Redash :) Nice to see Redash at the top of HN. I'll be happy to answer any questions about Redash, open source and about my journey to make Redash a self sustainable project. For any questions that don't fit on HN, feel free to reach me at arik at redash.io.

mansigandhi 10y ago
We LOVE REDASH at our company. Lack of adequate developers (the neverending startup saga) meant not everyone got what they wanted, fast enough. Redash has changed that for us. We use it extensively across all our teams (operations, sales, marketing etc). Thanks!
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antoineaugusti 10y ago
Thanks for your amazing work Arik and for keeping Redash open source. We <3 you
flaviuspopan 10y ago
Hi Arik, Quick question: to what decimal accuracy are the visualizations capable of displaying, and are second/sub-second time series possible in the dashboards? The issue our team has been having with other platforms such as Quicksight is the lack of support for extremely granular data visualization. Thanks in advance!

lolive 10y ago

Are some public datasets available directly as SQL endpoints? I know the Semantic Web provides some public datasets as SPARQL endpoints. But I have never heard of an equivalent for SQL.

fhoffa 10y ago
How about the BigQuery ones? http://demo.redash.io/ http://demo.redash.io/ works great with BigQuery.

yalooze 10y ago

Reminds me of Blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer

torkale 10y ago

This is awesome!

j_s 10y ago

Ask HN: Is there any open source BI tool that is always first on the list when the conversation finally gets to "Oh, you're on the Windows/Microsoft stack? Then you're probably going to wind up using _______"

numbsafari 10y ago
Have you tried using the growing support for docker and Linux running under windows? I haven't, personally. Just curious if others have.
sixdimensional 10y ago
I think part of the reason this happens is Java has wider support out of the box for most data sources via JDBC than Windows has with ODBC/ADO.NET. I mean, it's a close race, but most new open source databases have Java/JDBC drivers first and then ODBC second, for example. I think this may change a little with .NET being opened and cross platform, but it might take a while. Of course you can make Java/JDBC connections from Windows to databases but many users somehow find it more difficult and I've noticed an annoying trend among large enterprises running Windows on the desktop to not want to support Java/JDBC tools on the desktop, unless they are invested in it.
- j_s 10y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'm not unstanding why you mentioned Java/JDBC, I'm not aware of any of the mentioned tools (redash,superset,blazer; turns out metabase uses Clojure) using Java. Only redash doesn't list SQL Server support. What am I missing?
  - sixdimensional 10y ago
    Well, I meant in the general context of database connectivity. The underlying database connectivity plumbing is almost always a JDBC or ODBC interface when you're talking a regular DBMS [1]. Historically, ODBC was not always as popular on Linux (being a Microsoft standard originally), although that has changed a lot by today. JDBC was usually more associated to open source/Linux BI/database tools (Java being open source in origin itself), which is why for a while, you could connect to more data sources with JDBC drivers/interfaces than ODBC. Writing a JDBC driver is also many times less complicated than writing an ODBC driver. The ODBC spec is old and complicated.. JDBC is still difficult but much less complicated. Most programming languages can get to either a JDBC or ODBC driver via some mechanism, on pretty much any platform. So today I guess it's hard to say that it matters (ideally it shouldn't), I was just giving my personal take on the historical context that lead to the comment you made - "why doesn't this run in the Microsoft stack?". All of the tools mentioned (redash, superset, blazer) are relying on the underlying interfaces in ODBC / JDBC for regular databases. If the system is running on Unix and accessing ODBC, it is almost guaranteed to be using UnixODBC to be doing so. Any tool like this (I don't know the internal-specifics of these tools) would probably have built a layer in to abstract away the low-level interface into some mechanism that hopefully makes the use of JDBC or ODBC (or any interface) irrelevant. That's a lot harder than it seems on the face of it. I used to work for a company that made a product that connected / federated data from "any" platform - which is partly what influences my opinion of how difficult it is to wrangle all these interfaces at lower-levels. EDIT: I think the crux of what I'm saying is, the reason you don't have a tool that pops up when you ask that question is, because of OS platform differences, with Linux/open source usually being the first priority over Windows historically. [1] Some DBMS provide native web services connectivity which obviates the need for JDBC/ODBC completely.. which is kind of nice.

overcast 10y ago

How does the externally hosted version connect to databases?

arikfr 10y ago
(Redash author) You will need to allow access from our servers to your database. It's obviously a security concern, but we take great measures to ensure the safety of your data. If that's not an option, you can always run Redash self hosted.

kamranjon 10y ago

I was working for a company that relied heavily on Wagon - and then it got bought by Box and they shutdown the product. We looked for alternatives but nothing seemed to offer what Wagon had - this looks like it might be a good fit though. Excited to try it out.

seppemans 10y ago
You should also check out DataMill (http://www.datamillapp.com http://www.datamillapp.com), it's quite similar to what Wagon offered. Installed as an app, context-aware SQL autocomplete and built-in charting. It's in public beta - give it a try :-) (DataMill author)

notdonspaulding 10y ago

We're hosting on our own EC2 instance using the docker image. Setup was mostly smooth. We love the integration with Google Apps so our entire organization automatically has access. We primarily use it to connect to Amazon's Redshift and pull some data out for quick visual analysis. It's a very good combo. We're at the early stages of using it but it seems like a very solid product. Kudos to the dev!

tdelmas 10y ago

I didn't find 'The Art Of Computer Programming' by Donald Knuth... Must be a mistake.

etatkomoona 10y ago

Redash is great. We've tried several alternatives, including Metabase, and ended up with extensive Redash use. We use the self-hosted version for sharing data between the tech and business sides, for day-to-day monitoring and for ad-hoc visualizations, and are generally very happy with it. It's not perfect - there are some areas, like fine-control over chart customization, query auto-updates (especially queries with parameters) and the ability to queue parallel queries to the same data source which would be nice improvements, but these are nitpicks - highly recommended.

arikfr 10y ago
> queue parallel queries to the same data source That's definitely possible. You might need to tune the number of workers you have to run queries (and maybe adjust your database settings, if it has limits on concurrency). If you need help with this, you're welcome to the forum[1], Gitter[2] or Slack[3]. [1] https://discuss.redash.io https://discuss.redash.io [2] https://gitter.im/getredash/redash https://gitter.im/getredash/redash [3] https://slack.redash.io https://slack.redash.io
marrone12 10y ago
I've been looking at metabase myself. What were your main issues with it?
- etatkomoona 10y ago
  The main issue for us was support of JOINs (note that this was a while ago, not sure what's the status now; I did find this relatively recent discussion, though [1]) [1] http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins http://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins

gk1 10y ago

I'm a marketing consultant and Redash has worked its way into my preferred stack for analytics: Segment + Redshift + Redash. It replaces event- and user-tracking tools like Mixpanel, Heap, Woopra, and others. Those are just UI layers on top of SQL queries. If you or your marketers know (or can learn) even basic SQL then Redash is what you want.

xtracto 10y ago

I tried Redash some time ago while I was looking for a very simple "BI" like tool that our non-technical or low-technical colleagues could use (people in Client Satisfaction team). I settled for Metabase (http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/ , https://github.com/metabase/metabase https://github.com/metabase/metabase ), mainly for the ease of use and installation (a simple java -jar metabase.jar does the trick). Redash was a close second (one advantage at that time was the ability to have users that could only read queries), but after fighting with it for a while in order to install it, I tested Metabase and haven't looked back since.

arikfr 10y ago
(Redash author) Having a single executable is definitely the best, and I wish we had one for Readsh... trying to compensate on this with the Docker and cloud (AWS / GCE) images for easy setup.
- foodabytes 10y ago
  How about bitnami? They provide Redash virtual machines and installers already?
  - the_common_man 10y ago
    Or a cloudron app.
salsakran 10y ago
I'm one of the Metabase team, and for what it's worth, we support read-only users now!
- xtracto 10y ago
  Kind of... I mean, we use it very heavily in my current company. And we are always looking forward for a new release. What you cannot do right now (v0.22.0) is let some people see cards but not create "new questions". I know the current release being developed is tackling something akin to "published dashboards", so I am very happy. Btw, great work! you cannot imagine how happy Metabase made both our Devs (we didn't have the bandwidth to program dashboards or setup something more demanding) and our non-techs who were super excited to learn SQL and now have some impressive dashboards in Metabase. This is some shit we would be willing to pay for.

Maarius 10y ago

For those of you looking for a another fully hosted solution, check out https://www.cluvio.com https://www.cluvio.com (full disclosure: I am one of the founders). Like redash, Cluvio allows you to run SQL queries against your database and quickly visualize results as beautiful, interactive dashboards, which can easily be shared within your company or externally. We developed our own custom grammar on top of SQL which makes writing time-range related queries a lot easier and allows to parametrize queries, which powers the dashboard interactivity. We also allow to run custom R script on top of the SQL results, have SQL Alerts that run at specified schedules, allow you to create SQL Snippets and offer a free entry plan. Currently supported datasources are Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MariaDB and Amazon Aurora.

erlend_sh 10y ago
Hey Maarius, thanks for chiming in! I've had my eye on Cluvio for a while so I was gonna drop it in here to ask how the two compare. For me, an open source core is a huge gesture of trust though. It's the ultimate "no lock-in strategy" guarantee. This business model has been proven sustainable by several SAAS companies, such as Automattic (WordPress.com), Discourse (which I work for), Sentry, Piwik and hopefully Redash well! Any chance Cluvio will consider going down this path too?
- arikfr 10y ago
  At the moment (and I hope to keep it this way), it's not only the core of Redash that is open source -- it's the whole product. There are a few features that are introduced on the hosted version first, for ease of development. But most of it goes to the open source first. As we (Redash) use Discourse as well, it will be only fitting, to have Discourse use Redash :-) (btw, Sentry are Redash users as well[1]) Feel free to ping me (arik at redash.io). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599631
- Maarius 10y ago
  Good question! Our aim is to build the best cloud BI platform for SMEs and we currently don't plan to open source Cluvio. However, we do offer a "free forever" plan that allows you to use our platform for free, indefinitely.

vaidik 10y ago

We have been using Redash at our company for almost a year now. Every single release just proves how promising the project is. You can make useful dashboards in minutes. Support for multiple databases is amazing. We are using it with multiple PostgreSQLs, Redshift, MongoDB and InfluxDB. The most valuable feature is alerts though. I work at an ecommerce and operations heavy company where we have tons of connected components. Where alerts come really handy for us is that anyone in the organization can add quick alerts for proactive monitoring of events recorded in on-field ops and act when things go bad. This almost like building a feature on one of the internal tools, just doing that yourself without any engineering support. This comes in really handy. Kudos to the team! Looking forward to some more amazing stuff in Redash!

_joel 10y ago

Do any of the dashboards mentioned support exporting to a report?

arikfr 10y ago
You mean as a PDF or email?
- _joel 10y ago
  Yes, essentially. An export to a file on a given time period would be fine, can deal with the format conversion etc myself. I'm thinking of sending arbitrary reports to management without the need for Jasper etc.
  - abhirama 10y ago
    We are currently working on solving this exact same problem, developer friendly report automation sans visualization. We are entirely focused on solving the reporting problem before tacking visualisation etc. If you are interested in trying out our product, please send me an email at abhyrama at google email service and I will send you the instructions to try it out. The product is out and is being piloted in two large startups which have seen tremendous efficiency improvements in their whole reporting process. We are yet to bring the product public website up.
  - arikfr 10y ago
    Exports to CSV or Excel are already available. In future releases we will add support for full reports with visualizations and everything. It's actually already possible with some scripting and our API, but I want to add it into the product itself.
    - sixdimensional 10y ago
      Also, publish data set as a web service dataset, and now you're into the features offered by "data virtualization" software vendors / tools (things like Teiid or Denodo, for example).

huy 10y ago

I really like Redash, it’s one of the early tools that introduce this concept of turn SQL into chart to developers, and also teach developers to learn and write better SQL, altogether without any cost. I evaluated Redash during my past company back in 2013 (we were also using Tableau), but due to some Redash’s lack of features (no support for filters, lack of permission control, sporadic performance), we went and build something inhouse with similar approach (turn SQL into charts). And inspired by the same path Redash founder took, that internal project turned into a startup by itself. We’re relatively new but getting good momentum. Some of our customers went with us after evaluating both. While we don’t have a self-hosted open-source version, our pricing only starts at 49$/mo for up to 5 users (pretty affordable for startups IMHO). You can check it out here: https://www.holistics.io https://www.holistics.io

aceregen 10y ago
Hello! Redash is great if you are looking to host it in-house and have the engineering resources to set-up and maintain it. If you are looking for an affordable SaaS alternative, you may want to look into Holistics (www.holistics.io). (Note I'm the other co-founder here with huy) Besides supporting native SQL, Holistics is designed to address the gaps of SQL for common business reporting use-cases (flexible way of passing user inputs as parameters into report query; supporting if-else capabilities in SQL, reusable query templates and records/columns based access control for users/user groups). This makes it easier to manage and reduce the management of duplicate SQL query syntax across multiple reports/dashboards (especially multiple UNIONS/Case-Ifs statements). We also have our own DSL for you to configure in more details how certain charts should look like (beyond the normal coloring). A common problem we also see is that most data-related work is not just visualization, mainly for the reason that most data are not structured/formatted in the right table structure as most companies start off without a data warehouse. While most query tools requires customers to work with a separate ETL/warehousing tool, we’ve built an integrated approach towards data reporting and data preparation. Insights from our data reporting module (reports with expensive joins, long query times, non-optimal table structures) provides your data analyst inputs to easily move, map records, and transform data without technical engineering knowledge. Data in Google Sheets or CSVs with their data sync automatically (incrementally or full) to their database. And all this is done with the data not leaving our customers’ database (we don’t warehouse their data. Our data reporting module works directly with your database, and our data preparation module provides just the utilities (not infrastructure) to automate your data pipeline process. Do take some time to check us out! Quote HN and we give you an additional one day of free trial! :P

uberneo 10y ago

Added the missing Teradata support as the source (kind of) - https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-support/83/16 https://discuss.redash.io/t/teradata-data-source-support/83/... Waiting to resolve few more -- 1) Functionality for CSV/XLS file import , like in Tableau . Some discussion on - https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-source/216/5 https://discuss.redash.io/t/support-csv-data-source/216/5 2) Functionality to select "ALL" in filters 3) Functionality to merge data from multiple data source. I know it does exists in Paid version but waiting for it come in Opensource version.

ehfeng 10y ago

We use Redash at Sentry and it's become critical for marketing, sales, even engineering. Open source ftw!

kornish 10y ago

Great work! A quick question: what differentiates Redash from Chart.io, Periscope, or existing SQL-and-visualization BI tools?

actuator 10y ago

Thanks, @arikfr for the project. We started using redash about 2 years back. We use it for ad-hoc SQL to Redshift and MySQL and most of our business level KPI dashboards are there. One thing I would want to do is add some metabase like segmentation there(preferably that works with joins), so that marketing/sales people can also actively query from it.

fudged71 10y ago

For data visualization I recently switched from SQL+Excel to Tableau, and I'm never going back.

teej 10y ago
My qualms with Tableau is that they've moved excruciating slowly on MacOS support and that getting started from scratch seemed like a major development effort. We evaluated Tableau against Looker and are now very happy customers of the latter for a year+.

Jonovono 10y ago

After trying pretty much every BI tool we went with http://modeanalytics.com/ http://modeanalytics.com/ and have been pretty happy!

mmonihan 10y ago

Has anyone prioritized adding the ability to modify the HTML of the report the way ModeAnalytics.com does? I frequently want to map the data directly to highcharts.js when the UI can't get me to the result I want.