15 ms·

Google Data Studio

512 points by mkalygin 9y ago

jordache 9y ago
This vs MSFT Power BI?
- Paraesthetic 9y ago
  Thats what I thought too
pmichaud 9y ago
I need something like this, but I'm not willing to bet on a google product that will get shut down in a year. It's not worth it, I'd rather do a little extra work to build something custom that will exist as long as I need it.
- chachra 9y ago
  You got that right. Its side projects like this at Google that get shut down every year there is product roadmap cleanup!
- 97s 9y ago
  This is how I feel. So many things you spend time on with google get tanked. Bleh.
  - briffle 9y ago
    What have they shot down recently? I hadn't heard of any of their products getting the axe in several years...
    - txcwpalpha 9y ago
      It's not just the apps that Google explicitly "axes", there are also the ones that Google just stops paying attention to and they fade into nothingness. Google Voice comes to mind. My company recently switched to Google suite of apps (Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, etc) and soon after was given the heads up that we should expect minimal support/updated to Hangouts since Google is shifting their online chat efforts into Allo and Duo.
      - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
        Heads up from Google? They are actually investing into hangouts https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/google-goes-after-slack-and-splits-hangouts-into-chat-and-meet/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/google-goes-after-slack-an...
        matwood 9y ago
        Investing in Hangouts or making even more communication apps? Now there will be Allo, Duo, Chat, Meet, and of course Hangouts.
      - kyrra 9y ago
        For Google voice, they redid the UI for mobile and web back in January 2017 (completely new look). So I wouldn't say voice is dying. As for hangouts, they already announced the replacement for this. Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Meet is already out there and Chat is in closed beta.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Scroll down on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google...
    - rixed 9y ago
      Only considering my own workflow: some Hangouts api that some apps I was using relied upon. Probably related to that other product of them competing in the same space but nowhere as feature complete: Google duo.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      They’re right now shutting down Google Finance’s portfolios: https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png
- zebrafish 9y ago
  Microsoft's Power BI might get you what your looking for at a cost that is <<< Tableau.
- xapata 9y ago
  How is that different than working with a product from another company? Companies and products disappear with regularity. I don't think Google is more prone to it.
  - mrep 9y ago
    AWS SimpleDB. DynamoDB replaced it years ago but AWS keeps it running just for past customers
    - xapata 9y ago
      Perhaps there are enough users that the economics are different. Also, that's one of the more annoying things about AWS for a new user -- an overwhelming variety of services.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Is this post going to get made for literally everything that Google launches?
  - PascLeRasc 9y ago
    Without a doubt. I've gone one step further and stopped being friendly to my coworkers in case they change jobs and I don't see them again.
  - VHRanger 9y ago
    If it's a web based product, yes. The fact that it's google only makes this concern marginally appeased. I'm no Tableau fan at all, but the fact that it's a native app removes this doubt at least.
- jbacchi 9y ago
  You should check out Periscope Data, if you're SQL savvy.
- Maarius 9y ago
  You should have a look at https://www.cluvio.com/ https://www.cluvio.com/ - we don't plan to go anywhere (disclaimer: I work there).
nrjames 9y ago
I've been using this on the backside of Firebase Analytics (aka Google Analytics for Firebase) through the Firebase export to BigQuery. It's a powerful tool, but can be frustrating working with the schema that Firebase uses for BQ export. One thing that drives me nuts is that Data Studio does not alphabetically sort the fields in the attached BigQuery data set. I suppose they are listed in the order they appear in the schema, but wading through 30+ column names looking for the one you want is a pain when they're not sorted. If you use BigQuery and Tableau, you can hook those together, so there's not a ton of incentive to use Data Studio, too, unless it fits a need for sharing with a team. I can't speak to other Data Studio uses.
Finbarr 9y ago
You can connect Postgres, but not via ssl: https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&ref_topic=7332343 https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r.... It explicitly says "Be careful with the data you send.". Sounds like something to not connect to your production db.
- beefsack 9y ago
  > Sounds like something to not connect to your production db With or without SSL, exposing your raw prod data to external services like these is a huge risk. Only ever share filtered and redacted data with external entities.
  - Finbarr 9y ago
    Definitely agree.
  - slagfart 9y ago
    I think, with Postgres, if you have: 1. A dedicated read-only schema 2. A dedicated user, with only CONNECT to the read-only schema 3. A unique password 4. A dedicated read-only replica DB you should be safe against pretty much everything. I'd actually like to be corrected if I'm wrong - this is how I've built numerous externally-facing services.
    - philip1209 9y ago
      For non-secured connections, a snooper could still gain full access to all production data.
      - slagfart 9y ago
        How? Even with the password for this user, you could still only gain access to the read-only schema. Something I should have spelled out - the read-only schema has only the data that the charts need (heavily aggregated views). We basically build with the assumption that the schema will be compromised, but only that one schema.
thomasklau 9y ago
Why would I use this over Dash (Plotly)? https://plot.ly/products/dash/ https://plot.ly/products/dash/
- kingnothing 9y ago
  1. I've heard of Google but not Plot.ly 2. It's free, Plot.ly is $10,000 per year.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - txcwpalpha 9y ago
    Plot.ly is one of the largest, most widely used packages in the world of data science/visualization. If you haven't heard of Plot.ly, then you aren't the target audience for Google Data Studio anyway.
  - thomasklau 9y ago
    Plot.ly is MIT licensed! The hosting is 10K if you want them to host your charts. Plotly's pricing information is very confusing I must say.
johnnyo 9y ago
Sounds like a great idea, except for the part where I need to send all my data to Google.
- slagfart 9y ago
  This happily runs off a view that's got an aggregated subset of your data - so instead of sending customer IDs, consider sending a count of customer IDs against each metric instead.
  - curiousgal 9y ago
    Too much effort for so little added value. Plus you'll have to change things back when Google kills this project.
lostsock 9y ago
I'm currently using https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/ for this which I've found to be really easy to use. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Obvious advantage of metabase is that it's all local.
- fhoffa 9y ago
  Metabase is great - and another open source dashboard solution I'm a big fan of: https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/ Data Studio has a different set of strengths: It's the quickest way I can get an interactive viz published with 0 infrastructure needed. Just build your dashboard, add some controls, and publish it to your closest connections privately, or publicly to the whole world. It will scale without any resource allocation on your side. (disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud https://twitter.com/felipehoffa https://twitter.com/felipehoffa) (in a parallel thread, someone else mentions how they use re:dash and Data Studio https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296)
  - neves 9y ago
    Weird, there is no evident link to the source code in the redash.io page, but you can find it if you search: https://github.com/getredash/redash https://github.com/getredash/redash They give you an already configured virtual machine for free, but it doesn't receive bug fixes. The install process must be a mess. Metabase has a link to their repository in the first page of https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/ Just based in this fact I would prefer Metabase. How do they compare to generate high quality reports?
    - corford 9y ago
      Install process for redash doesn't look too bad (if you can give it it's own vm): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/setup/ubuntu/bootstrap.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/se... [ would be easy enough to transform that in to an ansible role ] Agree metabase wins though: apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless && curl http://downloads.metabase.com/v0.26.1/metabase.jar http://downloads.metabase.com/v0.26.1/metabase.jar && java -jar metabase.jar
greggman 9y ago
well since I see no way to report this issue to google directly and on the off chance someone from Google will see this ... selecting the language at the bottom of the page does nothing for me on iOS Chrome. Didn't try other browsers but guessing it's not iOS chrome specific. note my iOS is set to japanese
ClassyJacket 9y ago
While I'm sure this is useful to the right people, unfortunately my reaction when I see a new Google service announced is "Nobody should use this, it'll be abandoned in six months and shut down in twelve." I hope Google realises this is a viscous cycle where people avoid signing up for their services, causing low usage, causing them to abandon it, causing lower usage, causing them to shut it down, causing people to avoid signing up for their services...
- s17n 9y ago
  Is Google actually more likely to shut down a given service than any other company?
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Yes. Google's model is "user has zero say." On the one side of it is forced auto-update, and on the other side is forced deprecation.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Seems so, especially that most of the time we're talking about companies for which a given service is their only product. Personally, I've learned to treat SaaS products as throwaway by default. That is, if I can benefit from it short-term, like in 3 to 6 weeks, I may sign up. But I don't expect it to exist in 3 to 6 years, so I'm not going to invest much into using it.
    - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      I don't specifically blame Google when they acquire a startup and shut down the service. We don't know the financial condition of the company before the acquisition. Would you rather Google wait for the startup to officially fold and then scoop up the assets in bankruptcy? Their numbers definitely are adversely affected by these "acquisitions"
    - s17n 9y ago
      Companies with only one product are very likely to shut that product down when they go out of business or are acquired.
ehfeng 9y ago
We use this at Sentry for reporting for non-SQL-literate folks (also so we don't need to grant yet another 3rd party access to our data). It works pretty well We mostly use self-hosted Redash for day-to-day analytics for ad-hoc analytics questions.
catnaroek 9y ago
What advantages does this offer over doing everything on your own computer?
- briffle 9y ago
  How long does it take you to sort a 5TB dataset on your own computer?
  - flukus 9y ago
    I've only ever done a few percent of that, but it's a lot quicker than the eternity it would take to upload the data to google and sort it there, this is only viable if your data is already in googles data center.
ikeboy 9y ago
for some reason this gives a 400 error when logged in and works fine in incognito
Paraesthetic 9y ago
So.. powerbi by Google?
- manigandham 9y ago
  Somewhat, there are a lot of BI SQL/visualizations/charting/dashboard services today and this is just another alternative, but with the advantage of being well-integrated into Google's Cloud and GSuite products if you're already using them.
  - capkutay 9y ago
    It's funny when people complain about vendor lock-in from Oracle, IBM, other legacy enterprise products. Then they move everything to one of the big 3 clouds so they can use their whole suite of services...interesting.
fhoffa 9y ago
Play with a live interactive Data Studio dashboard - the most famous reddit accounts: - https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/reporting/0ByGAKP3QmCjLVUc4b2laRzNRQ1U/page/RFtG https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/rep... (the story behind: https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-accounts-c9958b5bc376 https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-accounts-c9...)
curiousgal 9y ago
You can't beat Tableau for this sort of task if you're not technically inclined and if you are then you can't beat Shiny. Both offer better and more customizable results. I wonder what the added value of this software is.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  It's quite convenient for those of us who already have the relevant data inside Google Cloud Platform (specifically BigQuery for me). I've made a few dashboard/graph-type things in Google Data Studio and they were super simple to set up and powerful enough for my use case. Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Cloud.
  - shostack 9y ago
    I had major problems getting AdWords custom columns working in here which was a deal breaker for me. Too bad since I'd expect AdWords to be fully supported, but then again custom columns aren't really first class citizens in AdWords yet :(
- neves 9y ago
  Like Tableau and Shiny it looks great for reports and presentations, but what would you know to get the hang of a new dataset? To visualize some descritive statistics, spot outliers, see missing data? Maybe it is better to use Python Pandas or R interactively to know more about your data.
  - trengrj 9y ago
    Usually a notebook style interface with Juypter / Zeppelin is best for this provided the user has enough capability.
  - dgudkov 9y ago
    Check out my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com http://easymorph.com). It's a hybrid between data prep and ETL -- you manipulate data interactively, yet it can work as an automated workflow. You can even build custom data profilers with it, tailored to your particular metrics of interest.
teej 9y ago
There are dozens of things like this now, so Google is pretty late to the game. I suspect that the play here is to keep people in the Google ecosystem by competing with Amazon on product offerings. Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate these kinds of services - 1/ How easy is it to get data in? 2/ Is my data safe? 3/ How easy is authoring? 4/ Does it support pivots? 5/ Can I model joins? 6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters? 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the case of Google Data Studio: 1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery. 7 - No examples, red flag. I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually managing a business week-to-week. Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard tells me: - How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD) - ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period) - ... relative to my goals - And a breakout of the drivers of that performance. Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then never revisit.
- fhoffa 9y ago
  An authoring demo I wrote the day Data Studio went public: - https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-google-analytics-data-studio-with-reddit-aprils-gilded-comments-for-ebe965dbbb15 https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-goo... Feature wise Data Studio has improved a lot since that day, and will continue to do so. (but just try it out, it's free https://datastudio.google.com/ https://datastudio.google.com/)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Joins are not supported, although its been on the todo since its ever went public beta.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wyldfire 9y ago
Are there any open source offerings that are comparable?
- neves 9y ago
  https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/
minitoar 9y ago
Shameless plug: https://demo.interana.com https://demo.interana.com
- gravypod 9y ago
  Is that your company? Do they hire for remote?
  - minitoar 9y ago
    Yes, no.
    - borje 9y ago
      So which is it? Just for future reference http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-yes/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-yes/
dbranes 9y ago
Note an open source alternative is superset[1] (formerly Panoramix/caravel by airbnb) [1](https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset)
- j_s 9y ago
  That was also mentioned on these discussions: PopSQL – Modern, collaborative SQL editor for your team | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 (Oct 2017, 49 comments) >ghh: Other solutions in the `write sql and share the graphs with your team`-space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 Franchise – An Open-Source SQL Notebook | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303833 (Sep 2017, 63 comments)
- thenaturalist 9y ago
  I'm actively compiling a list of both commercial & open source BI/ data viz/ ETL tools [1] in case you're interested in getting an overview. [1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
  - jannes 9y ago
    PowerBI, SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), ELK stack (i.e. Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana), Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (because you have DBeaver on the list)
    - thenaturalist 9y ago
      Thank you, added everything. I was surprised you mentioned the ELK stack as I associate it rather with DevOps and log analysis. Are you aware of a usage in a pure BI context?
  - madenine 9y ago
    https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.pdf?t=149626062 https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.p... Gartner report on commercial BI/Analytics might be useful to you
jonbaer 9y ago
If you have a local setup, a ton of data, and a few good GPU(s)+ I would go bare metal with MapD (http://www.mapd.com http://www.mapd.com) vs. the cloud.
smilbandit 9y ago
I've been using this since spring/summer. Is there a new release or something?
ryeon 9y ago
If you're trying to do any type of time frame comparisons (w/w, m/m, y/y) Google Data Studio is the WORST!
doh 9y ago
I'm using it for couple of months now. Great for simple queries, especially when you just quickly need to plot out data to see what's going on. Usually I did these things in matplotlib, pandas and it takes a lot of time to prepare the basics. Once you need something complicated, you will have to or spend decent amount of time preparing the data or back to coding.
kasperset 9y ago
Looks very similar to Tibco's Spotfire which I saw today at a data conference and also found https://superset.incubator.apache.org https://superset.incubator.apache.org by browsing over this last week.
fbonawiede 9y ago
This is not news? I use Metabase, and will continue to use it. Also in the process of setting up Luigi (created by Spotify team) to control dependencies and the ETL process prior to Metabase.
thebiglebrewski 9y ago
Does anyone know how to connect a service like this to a Heroku Postgresql DB securely and reliably?
- thenaturalist 9y ago
  Um yeah, that is pretty easy. It's just that GDS does not support SSL for Postgres. If you want, check out a list of BI/ data viz tools [1] I compiled or others mentioned here in the thread. Feel free to reach out if you have further questions. [1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
  - palmeida 9y ago
    Do you accept pull requests?
    - thenaturalist 9y ago
      Yes, of course!
pier25 9y ago
Is there a way to use a REST API as a data source? I'm not very comfortable with giving Google access to our databases.
- lolive 9y ago
  I think you spot the real question. What are the tools that deal with data viz without forcing you to share the data?
  - corford 9y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, good free ones are: https://metabase.com https://metabase.com and https://redash.io https://redash.io
- icebraining 9y ago
  Couldn't you create a few views with the necessary data and database role that could only see those and nothing else?
  - pier25 9y ago
    Probably, but giving someone access to the database is not such a great idea without a glue layer in between to control cache, rate limiting, etc.
n_t 9y ago
As if they already don't have enough, feed more data in to Google.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Is there anything here for a behavioral scientist, or it really geared for business data?
- futhey 9y ago
  Business data. If you're currently using SQL for data exploration you're probably not the audience for google data studio.
fredliu 9y ago
From the website, pretty hard to figure out exactly what's different about it. From the looks, is it something like AWS's QuickSight?
lerie82 9y ago
And now they have come for all your data.
ManlyBread 9y ago
Just what I was looking for - more ways for giving Google my data.
foreigner 9y ago
Why the heck don't they support SSL to Postgres? It's not like it's hard, surely it's built in to the driver, they just need to switch it on?
dmitriid 9y ago
I wonder when they realize tat people use multiple accounts with their services
beefield 9y ago
Two things that annoyed me when I last reviewed: There is no way to display individual time series data points, but they are always aggregated, and minimum resolution is one hour. You can have only 10 time series in a single visualization. (Of course, I just may not know how to use this...)
Kiro 9y ago
What are the best looking dashboards? This looks nice but I still want something even more flashy. Usefulness is less important.
lanbanger 9y ago
October 2020: "Google is winding down the Google Data Studio product over the next year, but will provide customer and technical support through the duration of license agreements.”
- simonsarris 9y ago
  On this note, Google is about to destroy everyone's Google Finance portfolios in November, without sending any kind of message to users, even as they claim they are relaunching the product. I didn't find this out until yesterday, I've been out of the US and won't be back until almost November. Google didn't email Google Finance users, they just posted a blurb at the top of the portfolio pages mentioning that if you want to keep your data you should download it.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    I at first didn’t believe you, but you’re right, they’re shutting down Finance in only a few weeks for a relaunch without portfolios: https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png
jmkni 9y ago
Surprisingly, they've built it on AngularJS!
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Surprisingly?
  - jmkni 9y ago
    Yeah, considering they are on Angular 5 now it's surprising that they have use 1.x.
digitalengineer 9y ago
I use this. I think it's not really for the developer, but rather for the Google Analytics guys. Add Analytics and Search Console data. Works great to get it out of the standard interface and make it more accessible for clients; what content is most popular? Is it moving up/down compared with the same timeframe before it? How are my pageviews/sessions doing? (Compared to previous), Avg. Time spend on site, % of sessions with search, up/down, what did they search for on my site? Where's my traffic coming from? How are the social channels performing? Whats the % desktop/mobile/tablet? How many impressions/clicks did the site make? Whats the site's CTR (and per search term)? Show the trends for the average position in Google, and so on...
golfer 9y ago
Wonder why this is just bubbling to the top now; Data Studio has been out for over a year. Here's 2 previous Hacker News discussions on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883
- jamesgeck0 9y ago
  I'm guessing it's because they recently launched support for 3rd party data connectors.
goldfishcaura 9y ago
Filter by Product: Data Studio, and the result says it all: https://www.google.com/analytics/success-stories/#?modal_active=none&product_filters=data-studio https://www.google.com/analytics/success-stories/#?modal_act... "Sorry, we couldn't find any success stories to match those filters."
joelbondurant 9y ago
Google Data Studio will be sunset after reaching alpha release v0.0.3.
Maarius 9y ago
Shameless plug: Have a look at Cluvio (https://www.cluvio.com/ https://www.cluvio.com/) for SQL-based alternative (disclaimer: I work there).

Google Data Studio

512 points by mkalygin 9y ago

jordache 9y ago

This vs MSFT Power BI?

Paraesthetic 9y ago
Thats what I thought too

pmichaud 9y ago

I need something like this, but I'm not willing to bet on a google product that will get shut down in a year. It's not worth it, I'd rather do a little extra work to build something custom that will exist as long as I need it.

chachra 9y ago
You got that right. Its side projects like this at Google that get shut down every year there is product roadmap cleanup!
97s 9y ago
This is how I feel. So many things you spend time on with google get tanked. Bleh.
- briffle 9y ago
  What have they shot down recently? I hadn't heard of any of their products getting the axe in several years...
  - txcwpalpha 9y ago
    It's not just the apps that Google explicitly "axes", there are also the ones that Google just stops paying attention to and they fade into nothingness. Google Voice comes to mind. My company recently switched to Google suite of apps (Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, etc) and soon after was given the heads up that we should expect minimal support/updated to Hangouts since Google is shifting their online chat efforts into Allo and Duo.
    - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
      Heads up from Google? They are actually investing into hangouts https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/google-goes-after-slack-and-splits-hangouts-into-chat-and-meet/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/google-goes-after-slack-an...
      - matwood 9y ago
        Investing in Hangouts or making even more communication apps? Now there will be Allo, Duo, Chat, Meet, and of course Hangouts.
    - kyrra 9y ago
      For Google voice, they redid the UI for mobile and web back in January 2017 (completely new look). So I wouldn't say voice is dying. As for hangouts, they already announced the replacement for this. Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Meet is already out there and Chat is in closed beta.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Scroll down on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google...
  - rixed 9y ago
    Only considering my own workflow: some Hangouts api that some apps I was using relied upon. Probably related to that other product of them competing in the same space but nowhere as feature complete: Google duo.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    They’re right now shutting down Google Finance’s portfolios: https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png
zebrafish 9y ago
Microsoft's Power BI might get you what your looking for at a cost that is <<< Tableau.
xapata 9y ago
How is that different than working with a product from another company? Companies and products disappear with regularity. I don't think Google is more prone to it.
- mrep 9y ago
  AWS SimpleDB. DynamoDB replaced it years ago but AWS keeps it running just for past customers
  - xapata 9y ago
    Perhaps there are enough users that the economics are different. Also, that's one of the more annoying things about AWS for a new user -- an overwhelming variety of services.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Is this post going to get made for literally everything that Google launches?
- PascLeRasc 9y ago
  Without a doubt. I've gone one step further and stopped being friendly to my coworkers in case they change jobs and I don't see them again.
- VHRanger 9y ago
  If it's a web based product, yes. The fact that it's google only makes this concern marginally appeased. I'm no Tableau fan at all, but the fact that it's a native app removes this doubt at least.
jbacchi 9y ago
You should check out Periscope Data, if you're SQL savvy.
Maarius 9y ago
You should have a look at https://www.cluvio.com/ https://www.cluvio.com/ - we don't plan to go anywhere (disclaimer: I work there).

nrjames 9y ago

I've been using this on the backside of Firebase Analytics (aka Google Analytics for Firebase) through the Firebase export to BigQuery. It's a powerful tool, but can be frustrating working with the schema that Firebase uses for BQ export. One thing that drives me nuts is that Data Studio does not alphabetically sort the fields in the attached BigQuery data set. I suppose they are listed in the order they appear in the schema, but wading through 30+ column names looking for the one you want is a pain when they're not sorted. If you use BigQuery and Tableau, you can hook those together, so there's not a ton of incentive to use Data Studio, too, unless it fits a need for sharing with a team. I can't speak to other Data Studio uses.

Finbarr 9y ago

You can connect Postgres, but not via ssl: https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&ref_topic=7332343 https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r.... It explicitly says "Be careful with the data you send.". Sounds like something to not connect to your production db.

beefsack 9y ago
> Sounds like something to not connect to your production db With or without SSL, exposing your raw prod data to external services like these is a huge risk. Only ever share filtered and redacted data with external entities.
- Finbarr 9y ago
  Definitely agree.
- slagfart 9y ago
  I think, with Postgres, if you have: 1. A dedicated read-only schema 2. A dedicated user, with only CONNECT to the read-only schema 3. A unique password 4. A dedicated read-only replica DB you should be safe against pretty much everything. I'd actually like to be corrected if I'm wrong - this is how I've built numerous externally-facing services.
  - philip1209 9y ago
    For non-secured connections, a snooper could still gain full access to all production data.
    - slagfart 9y ago
      How? Even with the password for this user, you could still only gain access to the read-only schema. Something I should have spelled out - the read-only schema has only the data that the charts need (heavily aggregated views). We basically build with the assumption that the schema will be compromised, but only that one schema.

thomasklau 9y ago

Why would I use this over Dash (Plotly)? https://plot.ly/products/dash/ https://plot.ly/products/dash/

kingnothing 9y ago
1. I've heard of Google but not Plot.ly 2. It's free, Plot.ly is $10,000 per year.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- txcwpalpha 9y ago
  Plot.ly is one of the largest, most widely used packages in the world of data science/visualization. If you haven't heard of Plot.ly, then you aren't the target audience for Google Data Studio anyway.
- thomasklau 9y ago
  Plot.ly is MIT licensed! The hosting is 10K if you want them to host your charts. Plotly's pricing information is very confusing I must say.

johnnyo 9y ago

Sounds like a great idea, except for the part where I need to send all my data to Google.

slagfart 9y ago
This happily runs off a view that's got an aggregated subset of your data - so instead of sending customer IDs, consider sending a count of customer IDs against each metric instead.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  Too much effort for so little added value. Plus you'll have to change things back when Google kills this project.

lostsock 9y ago

I'm currently using https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/ for this which I've found to be really easy to use. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Obvious advantage of metabase is that it's all local.

fhoffa 9y ago
Metabase is great - and another open source dashboard solution I'm a big fan of: https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/ Data Studio has a different set of strengths: It's the quickest way I can get an interactive viz published with 0 infrastructure needed. Just build your dashboard, add some controls, and publish it to your closest connections privately, or publicly to the whole world. It will scale without any resource allocation on your side. (disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud https://twitter.com/felipehoffa https://twitter.com/felipehoffa) (in a parallel thread, someone else mentions how they use re:dash and Data Studio https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296)
- neves 9y ago
  Weird, there is no evident link to the source code in the redash.io page, but you can find it if you search: https://github.com/getredash/redash https://github.com/getredash/redash They give you an already configured virtual machine for free, but it doesn't receive bug fixes. The install process must be a mess. Metabase has a link to their repository in the first page of https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/ Just based in this fact I would prefer Metabase. How do they compare to generate high quality reports?
  - corford 9y ago
    Install process for redash doesn't look too bad (if you can give it it's own vm): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/setup/ubuntu/bootstrap.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getredash/redash/master/se... [ would be easy enough to transform that in to an ansible role ] Agree metabase wins though: apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless && curl http://downloads.metabase.com/v0.26.1/metabase.jar http://downloads.metabase.com/v0.26.1/metabase.jar && java -jar metabase.jar

greggman 9y ago

well since I see no way to report this issue to google directly and on the off chance someone from Google will see this ... selecting the language at the bottom of the page does nothing for me on iOS Chrome. Didn't try other browsers but guessing it's not iOS chrome specific. note my iOS is set to japanese

ClassyJacket 9y ago

While I'm sure this is useful to the right people, unfortunately my reaction when I see a new Google service announced is "Nobody should use this, it'll be abandoned in six months and shut down in twelve." I hope Google realises this is a viscous cycle where people avoid signing up for their services, causing low usage, causing them to abandon it, causing lower usage, causing them to shut it down, causing people to avoid signing up for their services...

s17n 9y ago
Is Google actually more likely to shut down a given service than any other company?
- pishpash 9y ago
  Yes. Google's model is "user has zero say." On the one side of it is forced auto-update, and on the other side is forced deprecation.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Seems so, especially that most of the time we're talking about companies for which a given service is their only product. Personally, I've learned to treat SaaS products as throwaway by default. That is, if I can benefit from it short-term, like in 3 to 6 weeks, I may sign up. But I don't expect it to exist in 3 to 6 years, so I'm not going to invest much into using it.
  - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    I don't specifically blame Google when they acquire a startup and shut down the service. We don't know the financial condition of the company before the acquisition. Would you rather Google wait for the startup to officially fold and then scoop up the assets in bankruptcy? Their numbers definitely are adversely affected by these "acquisitions"
  - s17n 9y ago
    Companies with only one product are very likely to shut that product down when they go out of business or are acquired.

ehfeng 9y ago

We use this at Sentry for reporting for non-SQL-literate folks (also so we don't need to grant yet another 3rd party access to our data). It works pretty well We mostly use self-hosted Redash for day-to-day analytics for ad-hoc analytics questions.

catnaroek 9y ago

What advantages does this offer over doing everything on your own computer?

briffle 9y ago
How long does it take you to sort a 5TB dataset on your own computer?
- flukus 9y ago
  I've only ever done a few percent of that, but it's a lot quicker than the eternity it would take to upload the data to google and sort it there, this is only viable if your data is already in googles data center.

ikeboy 9y ago

for some reason this gives a 400 error when logged in and works fine in incognito

Paraesthetic 9y ago

So.. powerbi by Google?

manigandham 9y ago
Somewhat, there are a lot of BI SQL/visualizations/charting/dashboard services today and this is just another alternative, but with the advantage of being well-integrated into Google's Cloud and GSuite products if you're already using them.
- capkutay 9y ago
  It's funny when people complain about vendor lock-in from Oracle, IBM, other legacy enterprise products. Then they move everything to one of the big 3 clouds so they can use their whole suite of services...interesting.

fhoffa 9y ago

Play with a live interactive Data Studio dashboard - the most famous reddit accounts: - https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/reporting/0ByGAKP3QmCjLVUc4b2laRzNRQ1U/page/RFtG https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/rep... (the story behind: https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-accounts-c9958b5bc376 https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-accounts-c9...)

curiousgal 9y ago

You can't beat Tableau for this sort of task if you're not technically inclined and if you are then you can't beat Shiny. Both offer better and more customizable results. I wonder what the added value of this software is.

CydeWeys 9y ago
It's quite convenient for those of us who already have the relevant data inside Google Cloud Platform (specifically BigQuery for me). I've made a few dashboard/graph-type things in Google Data Studio and they were super simple to set up and powerful enough for my use case. Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Cloud.
- shostack 9y ago
  I had major problems getting AdWords custom columns working in here which was a deal breaker for me. Too bad since I'd expect AdWords to be fully supported, but then again custom columns aren't really first class citizens in AdWords yet :(
neves 9y ago
Like Tableau and Shiny it looks great for reports and presentations, but what would you know to get the hang of a new dataset? To visualize some descritive statistics, spot outliers, see missing data? Maybe it is better to use Python Pandas or R interactively to know more about your data.
- trengrj 9y ago
  Usually a notebook style interface with Juypter / Zeppelin is best for this provided the user has enough capability.
- dgudkov 9y ago
  Check out my EasyMorph (http://easymorph.com http://easymorph.com). It's a hybrid between data prep and ETL -- you manipulate data interactively, yet it can work as an automated workflow. You can even build custom data profilers with it, tailored to your particular metrics of interest.

teej 9y ago

There are dozens of things like this now, so Google is pretty late to the game. I suspect that the play here is to keep people in the Google ecosystem by competing with Amazon on product offerings. Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate these kinds of services - 1/ How easy is it to get data in? 2/ Is my data safe? 3/ How easy is authoring? 4/ Does it support pivots? 5/ Can I model joins? 6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters? 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the case of Google Data Studio: 1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery. 7 - No examples, red flag. I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually managing a business week-to-week. Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard tells me: - How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD) - ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period) - ... relative to my goals - And a breakout of the drivers of that performance. Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then never revisit.

fhoffa 9y ago
An authoring demo I wrote the day Data Studio went public: - https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-google-analytics-data-studio-with-reddit-aprils-gilded-comments-for-ebe965dbbb15 https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-goo... Feature wise Data Studio has improved a lot since that day, and will continue to do so. (but just try it out, it's free https://datastudio.google.com/ https://datastudio.google.com/)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sitepodmatt 9y ago
Joins are not supported, although its been on the todo since its ever went public beta.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wyldfire 9y ago

Are there any open source offerings that are comparable?

neves 9y ago
https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/

minitoar 9y ago

Shameless plug: https://demo.interana.com https://demo.interana.com

gravypod 9y ago
Is that your company? Do they hire for remote?
- minitoar 9y ago
  Yes, no.
  - borje 9y ago
    So which is it? Just for future reference http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-yes/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/ways-to-say-yes/

dbranes 9y ago

Note an open source alternative is superset[1] (formerly Panoramix/caravel by airbnb) [1](https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset)

j_s 9y ago
That was also mentioned on these discussions: PopSQL – Modern, collaborative SQL editor for your team | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 (Oct 2017, 49 comments) >ghh: Other solutions in the `write sql and share the graphs with your team`-space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 Franchise – An Open-Source SQL Notebook | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303833 (Sep 2017, 63 comments)
thenaturalist 9y ago
I'm actively compiling a list of both commercial & open source BI/ data viz/ ETL tools [1] in case you're interested in getting an overview. [1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
- jannes 9y ago
  PowerBI, SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), ELK stack (i.e. Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana), Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (because you have DBeaver on the list)
  - thenaturalist 9y ago
    Thank you, added everything. I was surprised you mentioned the ELK stack as I associate it rather with DevOps and log analysis. Are you aware of a usage in a pure BI context?
- madenine 9y ago
  https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.pdf?t=149626062 https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.p... Gartner report on commercial BI/Analytics might be useful to you

jonbaer 9y ago

If you have a local setup, a ton of data, and a few good GPU(s)+ I would go bare metal with MapD (http://www.mapd.com http://www.mapd.com) vs. the cloud.

smilbandit 9y ago

I've been using this since spring/summer. Is there a new release or something?

ryeon 9y ago

If you're trying to do any type of time frame comparisons (w/w, m/m, y/y) Google Data Studio is the WORST!

doh 9y ago

I'm using it for couple of months now. Great for simple queries, especially when you just quickly need to plot out data to see what's going on. Usually I did these things in matplotlib, pandas and it takes a lot of time to prepare the basics. Once you need something complicated, you will have to or spend decent amount of time preparing the data or back to coding.

kasperset 9y ago

Looks very similar to Tibco's Spotfire which I saw today at a data conference and also found https://superset.incubator.apache.org https://superset.incubator.apache.org by browsing over this last week.

fbonawiede 9y ago

This is not news? I use Metabase, and will continue to use it. Also in the process of setting up Luigi (created by Spotify team) to control dependencies and the ETL process prior to Metabase.

thebiglebrewski 9y ago

Does anyone know how to connect a service like this to a Heroku Postgresql DB securely and reliably?

thenaturalist 9y ago
Um yeah, that is pretty easy. It's just that GDS does not support SSL for Postgres. If you want, check out a list of BI/ data viz tools [1] I compiled or others mentioned here in the thread. Feel free to reach out if you have further questions. [1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligence https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
- palmeida 9y ago
  Do you accept pull requests?
  - thenaturalist 9y ago
    Yes, of course!

pier25 9y ago

Is there a way to use a REST API as a data source? I'm not very comfortable with giving Google access to our databases.

lolive 9y ago
I think you spot the real question. What are the tools that deal with data viz without forcing you to share the data?
- corford 9y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, good free ones are: https://metabase.com https://metabase.com and https://redash.io https://redash.io
icebraining 9y ago
Couldn't you create a few views with the necessary data and database role that could only see those and nothing else?
- pier25 9y ago
  Probably, but giving someone access to the database is not such a great idea without a glue layer in between to control cache, rate limiting, etc.

n_t 9y ago

As if they already don't have enough, feed more data in to Google.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

Is there anything here for a behavioral scientist, or it really geared for business data?

futhey 9y ago
Business data. If you're currently using SQL for data exploration you're probably not the audience for google data studio.

fredliu 9y ago

From the website, pretty hard to figure out exactly what's different about it. From the looks, is it something like AWS's QuickSight?

lerie82 9y ago

And now they have come for all your data.

ManlyBread 9y ago

Just what I was looking for - more ways for giving Google my data.

foreigner 9y ago

Why the heck don't they support SSL to Postgres? It's not like it's hard, surely it's built in to the driver, they just need to switch it on?

dmitriid 9y ago

I wonder when they realize tat people use multiple accounts with their services

beefield 9y ago

Two things that annoyed me when I last reviewed: There is no way to display individual time series data points, but they are always aggregated, and minimum resolution is one hour. You can have only 10 time series in a single visualization. (Of course, I just may not know how to use this...)

Kiro 9y ago

What are the best looking dashboards? This looks nice but I still want something even more flashy. Usefulness is less important.

lanbanger 9y ago

October 2020: "Google is winding down the Google Data Studio product over the next year, but will provide customer and technical support through the duration of license agreements.”

simonsarris 9y ago
On this note, Google is about to destroy everyone's Google Finance portfolios in November, without sending any kind of message to users, even as they claim they are relaunching the product. I didn't find this out until yesterday, I've been out of the US and won't be back until almost November. Google didn't email Google Finance users, they just posted a blurb at the top of the portfolio pages mentioning that if you want to keep your data you should download it.
- kuschku 9y ago
  I at first didn’t believe you, but you’re right, they’re shutting down Finance in only a few weeks for a relaunch without portfolios: https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png https://i.imgur.com/0o4Ehxe.png

jmkni 9y ago

Surprisingly, they've built it on AngularJS!

macspoofing 9y ago
Surprisingly?
- jmkni 9y ago
  Yeah, considering they are on Angular 5 now it's surprising that they have use 1.x.

digitalengineer 9y ago

I use this. I think it's not really for the developer, but rather for the Google Analytics guys. Add Analytics and Search Console data. Works great to get it out of the standard interface and make it more accessible for clients; what content is most popular? Is it moving up/down compared with the same timeframe before it? How are my pageviews/sessions doing? (Compared to previous), Avg. Time spend on site, % of sessions with search, up/down, what did they search for on my site? Where's my traffic coming from? How are the social channels performing? Whats the % desktop/mobile/tablet? How many impressions/clicks did the site make? Whats the site's CTR (and per search term)? Show the trends for the average position in Google, and so on...

golfer 9y ago

Wonder why this is just bubbling to the top now; Data Studio has been out for over a year. Here's 2 previous Hacker News discussions on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13558883

jamesgeck0 9y ago
I'm guessing it's because they recently launched support for 3rd party data connectors.

goldfishcaura 9y ago

Filter by Product: Data Studio, and the result says it all: https://www.google.com/analytics/success-stories/#?modal_active=none&product_filters=data-studio https://www.google.com/analytics/success-stories/#?modal_act... "Sorry, we couldn't find any success stories to match those filters."

joelbondurant 9y ago

Google Data Studio will be sunset after reaching alpha release v0.0.3.

Maarius 9y ago

Shameless plug: Have a look at Cluvio (https://www.cluvio.com/ https://www.cluvio.com/) for SQL-based alternative (disclaimer: I work there).