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Typically these platforms will query on a data warehouse that you provide: redshift, bigquery, a big postgres instance, or the like. In terms of getting data i

Typically these platforms will query on a data warehouse that you provide: redshift, bigquery, a big postgres instance, or the like. In terms of getting data into that warehouse, you can write ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts yourself. There are also a number of ETL-as-a-service providers like Stitch or Fivetran that cover common things you might want to sync into your data warehouse and query like salesforce, google analytics, quickbooks, etc: https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/sources/ https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/sources/

dmix 7y ago
Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs. I believe this is designed for much larger companies with integration teams and high-paid help consultants. Maybe I should build one although I'm sure an app like that exists already somewhere.
- arikfr 7y ago
  I'm not 100% sure if this is a fit for your needs, but Redash[1] (open source, but there is a hosted version too) you can query spreadsheets and APIs (within limits). Our JSON data source is not merged yet [2], although available already on the hosted version. You can see details here: https://redash.io/help/data-sources/querying/urls#JSON https://redash.io/help/data-sources/querying/urls#JSON [1] https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/ [2] https://github.com/getredash/redash/pull/3805 https://github.com/getredash/redash/pull/3805 (I'm the creator of Redash, now CEO of Redash the company)
  - dmix 7y ago
    This actually looks a lot like something I need. I'll give it a shot.
- acidbaseextract 7y ago
  I agree that these BI tools are not a trivial investment and are not trivial to use, but in defense of building on a SQL data warehouse: > Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P > I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs. The point is that everything speaks SQL, so vendor lock-in becomes much harder and there's no data source that "is not currently in our plans to support" — if you can get the data into the warehouse, it's supported. Definitely a higher barrier to entry for an individual, but I wouldn't do business BI without it. We've done some insane things, joining across data from 4+ different systems (CRM, email open tracking, analytics, primary app database, email to a blessed account) in ways that would be impossible for an "off the shelf" solution.
- buremba 7y ago
  There are tools such as Klipfolio and Grow but you're only limited using their UI to build the reports. That's always limiting no matter how flexible their language & UI is and larger companies tend to build their own data-warehouse to be able to query the data using SQL without any limit. That's why Periscope, Looker and Mode Analytics are quite popular. There are also open-source tools that help you to ingest the data to your database such as Singer.io. Once you have all your data in raw format, you can model your data and power your BI without any limitation.

dmix 7y ago

Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs. I believe this is designed for much larger companies with integration teams and high-paid help consultants. Maybe I should build one although I'm sure an app like that exists already somewhere.

arikfr 7y ago
I'm not 100% sure if this is a fit for your needs, but Redash[1] (open source, but there is a hosted version too) you can query spreadsheets and APIs (within limits). Our JSON data source is not merged yet [2], although available already on the hosted version. You can see details here: https://redash.io/help/data-sources/querying/urls#JSON https://redash.io/help/data-sources/querying/urls#JSON [1] https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/ [2] https://github.com/getredash/redash/pull/3805 https://github.com/getredash/redash/pull/3805 (I'm the creator of Redash, now CEO of Redash the company)
- dmix 7y ago
  This actually looks a lot like something I need. I'll give it a shot.
acidbaseextract 7y ago
I agree that these BI tools are not a trivial investment and are not trivial to use, but in defense of building on a SQL data warehouse: > Of course there's ANOTHER company to help me generate the scripts to popular 3rd parties :P > I guess what I want is some powerful individual-use product that has some easy analytics automation on spreadsheets / APIs. The point is that everything speaks SQL, so vendor lock-in becomes much harder and there's no data source that "is not currently in our plans to support" — if you can get the data into the warehouse, it's supported. Definitely a higher barrier to entry for an individual, but I wouldn't do business BI without it. We've done some insane things, joining across data from 4+ different systems (CRM, email open tracking, analytics, primary app database, email to a blessed account) in ways that would be impossible for an "off the shelf" solution.
buremba 7y ago
There are tools such as Klipfolio and Grow but you're only limited using their UI to build the reports. That's always limiting no matter how flexible their language & UI is and larger companies tend to build their own data-warehouse to be able to query the data using SQL without any limit. That's why Periscope, Looker and Mode Analytics are quite popular. There are also open-source tools that help you to ingest the data to your database such as Singer.io. Once you have all your data in raw format, you can model your data and power your BI without any limitation.