12 ms·

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 compet

by 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.
koolba 9y ago
I don’t get why no ssl? You almost have to go out of your way to not support it.
- halflings 9y ago
  I'm not sure where the author gets that. This demo uses SSL: https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0B_U5RNpwhcE6SF85TENURnc4UjA/page/1M/preview https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0B_U5RNpwhcE6SF85TEN... All Google products use SSL anyway.
  - confounded 9y ago
    If I’ve understood, they’re talking about the psql database connections, not the website URL.
    - londons_explore 9y ago
      Unless your data is pretty small, you'll be wanting it in bigquery not postgres anyway.
      - koolba 9y ago
        Pardon the curtness but "Your data isn't big enough for security" is the stupidest justification I've heard yet.
iaw 9y ago
After some of the product shutdowns by Google I feel like there's a huge risk building your visualizations on this product. There are so many alternative ways to achieve the same goal for free or very low cost that unless Google has some secret sauce the product will probably be dead in a few years causing headaches for anyone relying on them.
- orf 9y ago
  Replace 'Google' with the name of any of the other startups (or larger companies) in this space and it makes just as much sense.
  - richforrester 9y ago
    Not really. Proven trackrecords matter. Also, Google can shut down this product without thinking twice. A company that has it as their sole product however, can't. That's a huge difference.
    - chaosite 9y ago
      Startups fold or get bought and shutdown their product all the time. With Google you usually get a year heads-up before your API disappears Sure, both scenarios are not ideal, and there are usually other very good reasons to prefer the non-Google solution. But it's not like going with Google is a horrible mistake that would leave you SOL.
      - fuck_google 9y ago
        Going with Google just makes you look like a fool. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
      - richforrester 9y ago
        > (or larger companies) in this space That's what I'm responding to. Of course startups can be far worse. Goes without saying.
    - 9y ago
hammock 9y ago
What is the best-in-class of these things?
- teej 9y ago
  From a capabilities perspective, Tableau and Power BI have everything and the kitchen sink. But they tend to be $$$$ because of licensing costs, paying for extras, and because you need lots and lots of training for devs, analysts, and end users. Oh, and practically Windows only. There's a new generation of these tools that started web-first. They don't have all the bells and whistles but the learning curve is way lower. So far none have truly stand ahead of the rest but there are some promising ones. But because you almost always need a dev-in-the-loop, almost every company needing a tool like this starts with a DIY open source solution.
- agacera 9y ago
  I use and recommend metabase and redash. Metabase is more polished and easier for business folks. But redash supports more data sources (hive for instance). Both are open source and in my opinion can fill about 80% of dashboards and ad hoc analysis for a small to medium company. The other 20 % your company must be rich enough to buy Tableau or rich enough to build its own solution. https://www.metabase.com https://www.metabase.com https://redash.io https://redash.io
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    > 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag. Can Metabase do this? I struggled to get a This Year vs Last Year chart without messing with the underlying data. Is there a good book on Metabase out there?
    - agacera 9y ago
      yes it is, as long as you can represent it in SQL. for instance, for a query like: select day_of_year, year, count(*) from orders where year >= 2016 group by day_of_year, year you can create a line visualization that will display the different years as different lines in about 2 or 3 clicks. AFAIK, there is no book for Metabase. But the documentation and the project is really straightforward.
huy 9y ago
As I read through your list, I feel like our product (https://holistics.io https://holistics.io) can serve you well on these fronts - We are both ETL + BI, we help you get data into your DW easily (CSV Upload, DB Sync, etc) - Support for dashboard-wide filters, model joins, pivots For complex time comparison (last week, QTD, YTD) we have metrics spreadsheets: https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/ https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/
edwinnathaniel 9y ago
BI/Analytics is a tricky area with many sub-areas. I'm relatively new to this field and I found the value of the solution is how it can connect various business workflows instead of just focused on building dashboards. For example: typical BI tools only focused on Visualizations (most mentioned here only support that and a bit of "Insight"). This alone is not enough because business activities around BI would require forecasting/predictive and planning (and potentially Risk Assessment). Disclaimer: I work for a business-unit that develop Analytics solution that covered those business activities (https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product/ https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product/).
halflings 9y ago
"I'd rate this as pretty mediocre." Most of what you are saying is unsubstantiated. It does use SSL (just like all Google products). Where did you gather that it wasn't using it? And what do you mean by "complex time comparisons"? There are examples of time series comparisons in the demos.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- teej 9y ago
  > Most of what you are saying is unsubstantiated. You're welcome to your opinion. > 1/ How easy is it to get data in? Seems standard. It supports a MySQL adapter and a PostgreSQL adapter and then a bunch of Google property adapaters. This is standard. > 2/ Is my data safe? Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. The PostgreSQL adapter doesnt use SSL (https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&ref_topic=7332343 https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r...). This is a showstopper. > 3/ How easy is authoring? [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. You can see Felipe's demo here and make your own assessment. 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... > 4/ Does it support pivots? Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. If you find an example I'd love to see it. My expectation at a bare minimum is a table view with a dimension down the left, a dimension across the top, and a measure in the cells. I looked through all the examples and did not see a clear example of a pivot. > 5/ Can I model joins? [EDIT] it cant, see reply It can't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446616 > 6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters? Many examples of this in the gallery Most of the examples in the gallery use this feature. > 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag. Here's a couple very basic examples of what I'm talking about. - Plug an TY date range into the dashboard filter. Get a view that shows you TY performance in that range vs LY - Filter the dashboard using calendar dates, display using fiscal dates. The rest is written from my personal experiences. If your experiences are different, I'm open to hearing about it. Feel free to email me if you'd prefer.
  - 9y ago
futhey 9y ago
I've setup a few (more or less standard) data warehouses in Redshift. Prefer SQL for data exploration. That being said, I've used GDS for a few months now, and it has a lot of mid-market potential, since it pulls data from Google Analytics, Adwords, & Youtube out of the box, and, is completely free. I say "mid-tier" because, for large-scale but relatively simple use-cases (I work on a v. large e-commerce site for a large multi-national, some scale but not the most complex setup I've worked with). While you're "in the ecosystem", you're abstracted from a number of complex issues, like data quality, ingestion jobs, ETL, normalization, etc. HUGE deal for a lot of folks transitioning "into the big leagues". Commercial-off-the-shelf solutions for a lot of the products companies use are supported by the big ETL startups (Fivetran, Alooma, Stitch Data) to BigQuery. I think their long term goal is to get these mid-tier folks in and standardized on BigQuery. In the future this may become more competitive with Redshift. It makes sense. They own the bottom tier. Every team gets started these days by getting good at Google Analytics. Then they outgrow it, and move "out of the ecosystem". Eventually, they may be able to build out an ecosystem around BigQuery for data scientists and data science teams, but filling that gap could make them a ton of money. UX isn't quite where I would like it, but it's getting better. Some small details make the interface confusing, but that's par the course in this domain. 1/ Getting data in is fine, but you're using BQ. Personal preference that is not my favorite tool. 2/ To my knowledge Google Cloud offers the same guarantees and promises as AWS 3/ Authoring is very easy. Perhaps too easy (I would say this is probably one of the best mid-range tools for data vis. I wouldn't say it wins on a feature-by-feature comparison to PowerBI or Tableau). 4/ Partial (limited extent, but w/o writing SQL) 5/ Partial, but not to the extent you would want in a paid tool in this category. Again, no SQL (this is probably a win for some folks, and a minus for others) 6/ Yes. Although it's more like Filters on a whole dashboard or multiple pages of reports in a project. 7/ I've done custom binning, trailing time periods, pretty much everything I would do on a routine basis for data exploration. However, there's no SQL chart authoring, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I'm missing here. --- Bottom line, if you're mid-tier it's a great free tool to try, especially if you're just a data scientist looking to do something fancy for a Marketing team with Marketing data, who hasn't really been exposed to rigorous analysis in the past. You could easily do the type of exploration to make good decisions about building an attribution model, for example. Would meet the needs of 99% of companies I've consulted for, if it wasn't for BQ vs. Redshift.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
> 5/ Can I model joins? They have been saying this is a top requested feature and it is coming for ~2 years. Its a serious limitation.
rkunnamp 9y ago
I happen to build a competing service. Yours is a great list. Have saved it instantly! Thank You for that.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
Dashboards Grafana and Kibana enable a lot of clients to self host and create the exact dashboards they need, per customer, per employee etc. Storing stats and data in elasticsearch, influxdb etc etc.

by teej 9y ago

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.

koolba 9y ago

I don’t get why no ssl? You almost have to go out of your way to not support it.

halflings 9y ago
I'm not sure where the author gets that. This demo uses SSL: https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0B_U5RNpwhcE6SF85TENURnc4UjA/page/1M/preview https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0B_U5RNpwhcE6SF85TEN... All Google products use SSL anyway.
- confounded 9y ago
  If I’ve understood, they’re talking about the psql database connections, not the website URL.
  - londons_explore 9y ago
    Unless your data is pretty small, you'll be wanting it in bigquery not postgres anyway.
    - koolba 9y ago
      Pardon the curtness but "Your data isn't big enough for security" is the stupidest justification I've heard yet.

iaw 9y ago

After some of the product shutdowns by Google I feel like there's a huge risk building your visualizations on this product. There are so many alternative ways to achieve the same goal for free or very low cost that unless Google has some secret sauce the product will probably be dead in a few years causing headaches for anyone relying on them.

orf 9y ago
Replace 'Google' with the name of any of the other startups (or larger companies) in this space and it makes just as much sense.
- richforrester 9y ago
  Not really. Proven trackrecords matter. Also, Google can shut down this product without thinking twice. A company that has it as their sole product however, can't. That's a huge difference.
  - chaosite 9y ago
    Startups fold or get bought and shutdown their product all the time. With Google you usually get a year heads-up before your API disappears Sure, both scenarios are not ideal, and there are usually other very good reasons to prefer the non-Google solution. But it's not like going with Google is a horrible mistake that would leave you SOL.
    - fuck_google 9y ago
      Going with Google just makes you look like a fool. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
    - richforrester 9y ago
      > (or larger companies) in this space That's what I'm responding to. Of course startups can be far worse. Goes without saying.
  - 9y ago

hammock 9y ago

What is the best-in-class of these things?

teej 9y ago
From a capabilities perspective, Tableau and Power BI have everything and the kitchen sink. But they tend to be $$$$ because of licensing costs, paying for extras, and because you need lots and lots of training for devs, analysts, and end users. Oh, and practically Windows only. There's a new generation of these tools that started web-first. They don't have all the bells and whistles but the learning curve is way lower. So far none have truly stand ahead of the rest but there are some promising ones. But because you almost always need a dev-in-the-loop, almost every company needing a tool like this starts with a DIY open source solution.
agacera 9y ago
I use and recommend metabase and redash. Metabase is more polished and easier for business folks. But redash supports more data sources (hive for instance). Both are open source and in my opinion can fill about 80% of dashboards and ad hoc analysis for a small to medium company. The other 20 % your company must be rich enough to buy Tableau or rich enough to build its own solution. https://www.metabase.com https://www.metabase.com https://redash.io https://redash.io
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  > 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag. Can Metabase do this? I struggled to get a This Year vs Last Year chart without messing with the underlying data. Is there a good book on Metabase out there?
  - agacera 9y ago
    yes it is, as long as you can represent it in SQL. for instance, for a query like: select day_of_year, year, count(*) from orders where year >= 2016 group by day_of_year, year you can create a line visualization that will display the different years as different lines in about 2 or 3 clicks. AFAIK, there is no book for Metabase. But the documentation and the project is really straightforward.

huy 9y ago

As I read through your list, I feel like our product (https://holistics.io https://holistics.io) can serve you well on these fronts - We are both ETL + BI, we help you get data into your DW easily (CSV Upload, DB Sync, etc) - Support for dashboard-wide filters, model joins, pivots For complex time comparison (last week, QTD, YTD) we have metrics spreadsheets: https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/ https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/

edwinnathaniel 9y ago

BI/Analytics is a tricky area with many sub-areas. I'm relatively new to this field and I found the value of the solution is how it can connect various business workflows instead of just focused on building dashboards. For example: typical BI tools only focused on Visualizations (most mentioned here only support that and a bit of "Insight"). This alone is not enough because business activities around BI would require forecasting/predictive and planning (and potentially Risk Assessment). Disclaimer: I work for a business-unit that develop Analytics solution that covered those business activities (https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product/ https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product/).

halflings 9y ago

"I'd rate this as pretty mediocre." Most of what you are saying is unsubstantiated. It does use SSL (just like all Google products). Where did you gather that it wasn't using it? And what do you mean by "complex time comparisons"? There are examples of time series comparisons in the demos.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
teej 9y ago
> Most of what you are saying is unsubstantiated. You're welcome to your opinion. > 1/ How easy is it to get data in? Seems standard. It supports a MySQL adapter and a PostgreSQL adapter and then a bunch of Google property adapaters. This is standard. > 2/ Is my data safe? Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. The PostgreSQL adapter doesnt use SSL (https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&ref_topic=7332343 https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r...). This is a showstopper. > 3/ How easy is authoring? [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. You can see Felipe's demo here and make your own assessment. 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... > 4/ Does it support pivots? Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. If you find an example I'd love to see it. My expectation at a bare minimum is a table view with a dimension down the left, a dimension across the top, and a measure in the cells. I looked through all the examples and did not see a clear example of a pivot. > 5/ Can I model joins? [EDIT] it cant, see reply It can't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446616 > 6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters? Many examples of this in the gallery Most of the examples in the gallery use this feature. > 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag. Here's a couple very basic examples of what I'm talking about. - Plug an TY date range into the dashboard filter. Get a view that shows you TY performance in that range vs LY - Filter the dashboard using calendar dates, display using fiscal dates. The rest is written from my personal experiences. If your experiences are different, I'm open to hearing about it. Feel free to email me if you'd prefer.
- 9y ago

futhey 9y ago

I've setup a few (more or less standard) data warehouses in Redshift. Prefer SQL for data exploration. That being said, I've used GDS for a few months now, and it has a lot of mid-market potential, since it pulls data from Google Analytics, Adwords, & Youtube out of the box, and, is completely free. I say "mid-tier" because, for large-scale but relatively simple use-cases (I work on a v. large e-commerce site for a large multi-national, some scale but not the most complex setup I've worked with). While you're "in the ecosystem", you're abstracted from a number of complex issues, like data quality, ingestion jobs, ETL, normalization, etc. HUGE deal for a lot of folks transitioning "into the big leagues". Commercial-off-the-shelf solutions for a lot of the products companies use are supported by the big ETL startups (Fivetran, Alooma, Stitch Data) to BigQuery. I think their long term goal is to get these mid-tier folks in and standardized on BigQuery. In the future this may become more competitive with Redshift. It makes sense. They own the bottom tier. Every team gets started these days by getting good at Google Analytics. Then they outgrow it, and move "out of the ecosystem". Eventually, they may be able to build out an ecosystem around BigQuery for data scientists and data science teams, but filling that gap could make them a ton of money. UX isn't quite where I would like it, but it's getting better. Some small details make the interface confusing, but that's par the course in this domain. 1/ Getting data in is fine, but you're using BQ. Personal preference that is not my favorite tool. 2/ To my knowledge Google Cloud offers the same guarantees and promises as AWS 3/ Authoring is very easy. Perhaps too easy (I would say this is probably one of the best mid-range tools for data vis. I wouldn't say it wins on a feature-by-feature comparison to PowerBI or Tableau). 4/ Partial (limited extent, but w/o writing SQL) 5/ Partial, but not to the extent you would want in a paid tool in this category. Again, no SQL (this is probably a win for some folks, and a minus for others) 6/ Yes. Although it's more like Filters on a whole dashboard or multiple pages of reports in a project. 7/ I've done custom binning, trailing time periods, pretty much everything I would do on a routine basis for data exploration. However, there's no SQL chart authoring, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I'm missing here. --- Bottom line, if you're mid-tier it's a great free tool to try, especially if you're just a data scientist looking to do something fancy for a Marketing team with Marketing data, who hasn't really been exposed to rigorous analysis in the past. You could easily do the type of exploration to make good decisions about building an attribution model, for example. Would meet the needs of 99% of companies I've consulted for, if it wasn't for BQ vs. Redshift.

Gustomaximus 9y ago

> 5/ Can I model joins? They have been saying this is a top requested feature and it is coming for ~2 years. Its a serious limitation.

rkunnamp 9y ago

I happen to build a competing service. Yours is a great list. Have saved it instantly! Thank You for that.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

Dashboards Grafana and Kibana enable a lot of clients to self host and create the exact dashboards they need, per customer, per employee etc. Storing stats and data in elasticsearch, influxdb etc etc.