6 ms·

Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative

236 points by yuegui 7y ago

cateye 7y ago
Would be useful to have some information how this compares with https://www.metabase.com/ https://www.metabase.com/ or https://meltano.com/ https://meltano.com/
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Metabase can't be beaten in terms of looks and functionality but I do like this.
  - massaman_yams 7y ago
    Superset's not the best in terms of looks, but it beats Metabase hands down for functionality.
    - polskibus 7y ago
      Which functionalities would you point out as the most important in Superset that are missing in Metabase?
      - massaman_yams 7y ago
        Depends heavily on your use case, but there are a lot of advanced features. From a review last year (so some of this may be outdated): - Broader datasource support - 20 sources in Superset, vs 12 in Metabase Superset supports: - view creation by users ('create table as'), as well as materialization - geo/GIS based visualizations - day over day, week over week, etc. charting; moving averages, etc. Superset is missing data catalog-like functions, which metabase has, though I didn't evaluate metabase's data catalog in depth. It also requires you to write SQL, where Metabase includes a query builder UI - though there was a rather strange difference in capabilities within Metabase between the SQL-based charting and the query builder UI.
  - roelb 7y ago
    Don't agree, in the past metabase was good, now it's just getting worse. I was a big fan of metabase (to the point I deployed it in 4 companies and rolled it out for many people to use in their daily workflow). All was nice. Somewhere around 0.31 something changed in the internal dev/release flow. I get the feeling they have some kind of internal push to add unnecessary untested features which all look nice on paper, and work on a 5-row 5-column user tables. Until you actually use those features and all functionality fails miserably.. Had weird issues with it, which usually occurred after upgrades, on both small and bigger decently indexed DB's (pg and mysql), things like: - had sets of reports which all worked fine until they hit a 1001 rows.. and suddenly the UI had a react race condition. - X-Rays which silently fail and break the UI, while on the DB server you see the queries complete. - Deployed new versions which would hammer databases by distincting every column individually every hour, instead of handling statistics a bit more intelligently. Disabled that ofcourse. - Deployed versions in other countries, where the UI client-server latency caused the whole UI to break (probably the limits of setTimeout reached? :-)). If you check the github issues, it's just ignored problems and they are focus on releasing new functionality instead of fixing the issues. Doesn't really motivate to report anymore problems. They had one good thing: they would allow you to work in sql and write efficient queries, but clearly they decided it's time to remove the last good feature and now only want graphical query builders. If you use metabase: deploy it on a replica such it doesn't whack your prod DB. And take backups before upgrading, because there is no revert. I've spent enough time on Metabase problems, won't touch it anymore.
    - salsakran 7y ago
      I'm on the Metabase team - We've walked a fine line between fixing bugs, adding the features that our users have asked for and building out the BI interface we think the world should be using in 5 years. We don't always get it right, and I'm sorry if we broke things for you on the performance side. We will be spending a few of our development cycles after 0.33 to try to clear out our bug queue. One specific factual point I'd like to reply to however - SQL isn't going anywhere. If anything we're making it easier to both write plain SQL, use SQL templates or use our graphical interface on top of SQL query results in our next release (preview at https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-preview2 https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-pr...)
  - westpfelia 7y ago
    Is there anyway to use a BI tool like Metabase and combine it with Qradar? I'm interested in being able to create useful reports.
- tdhz77 7y ago
  I’m still using informixDB so the bring your own jbdc connector maybe what I was looking for in Poli.
ccffph 7y ago
This looks great! I've been searching for something similar for a side project and I think I'll give Poli a try. Thank you.
apahwa 7y ago
why not use Superset?
- massaman_yams 7y ago
  Superset's very powerful, but other options can be easier for common use cases.
- exabrial 7y ago
  ever try to setup superset?
  - FridgeSeal 7y ago
    Yeah I deployed it to Kubernetes the other day. I got it up in a few hours, and the included docker (compose) files are helpful, but it was a frustrating experience for a couple of reasons: * There is some legal issue with the Apache foundation that’s preventing them publishing to PyPi (details about this were lacking). * As a result, the provided dockerfile uses a very outdated version. * Installing any missing dependencies means essentially building your own dockerfile anyways: in my case, it was the bane of my life Snowflake DB dependencies... * Maybe it’s just me, but figuring out how to go from single-container ephemeral deployment to backend celery workers, external DB for persistence and a redos instance for caching (the recommended production setup) was frustrating to no end * There are hosted versions you can use. That said, we’re still going ahead with Superset, because it’s an improvement over the costly, ugly and over-opinionated alternative that is Tableau...
- rb808 7y ago
  yeah I was hoping for more feedback on Superset and with Druid as well. They look great but there's very little buzz about them.
cabaalis 7y ago
Wow, thanks! I have built many visualizations and dashboards using javascript and d3, and even just a couple of weeks ago was considering creating my own side-project to do just what this software does. I guess I'll be looking for a new project..
roywiggins 7y ago
This looks nice. We have been using http://redash.io http://redash.io for basic reporting dashboards, but this looks promising.
edgarvaldes 7y ago
Quite impressive, bookmarked for later use. What is the story behind Poli?
- yuegui 7y ago
  Thanks. The project is built mainly to solve my own problem that I often receive requests from the business side that they wanna access the data in the production system (We use different RDMS and Elasticsearch) so they can generate some simple charts in Excel and display to the customers. The request is not difficult but we just don't have a system for that. Since then, I have been trying different BI solutions like Power BI, Kibana and some other open source tools. They are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough to me. That's why I build Poli. I want it to be more focusing on easy to use, having an open license and the developer can use SQL to build reports easily for the end users or embed the reports in their systems.
donpdonp 7y ago
BI = Business Intelligence
- Ygg2 7y ago
  BI = Writing reports
  - bollockitis 7y ago
    Generating reports!
    - opportune 7y ago
      BI = dashboards that are clicked through by consultants to manually generate reports that are read by management 5m every day while they take their morning shits
stewbrew 7y ago
It's a pity they use pie charts to show off their software. At least the don't show them in 3D. (And just to make it clear: there is no use case where pie charts are the best solution. At best they are an acceptable solution.)
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Even worse is the "Sales Ranking" in the first example, clearly the size or area of the entries is not proportional to the differences in sales, instead it is highly misleading to display the data as a perfect triangle. The TreeMap-esque "Qty by Product" is also useless -- is Cup larger or smaller than Glass? Stacked bars for "Location by Year" is another obfuscated mechanism for delivering "information" -- which was the best year for Warehouse?
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  What's wrong with pie charts? What would you suggest using when you want to see a percentage breakdown?
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Use bars showing percentage. This way you can compare the values to a scale on the side and to each other. You can't see a difference easily on a pie chart without annotation. With enough values, you likely can't tell 5% from 10%, and difference between a fragment on the left from a fragment on the right. This is even worse in 3d pie chart which doesn't even preserve proportions in areas/angles, so splitting in 4 parts, bottom/top will be larger than left/right.
    - mikorym 7y ago
      I think it's better to say that "for most people there is a better alternative" than to say that pie charts should never be used. EDIT: If you are showing who ate which parts of a pizza (to be pedantic) I'm sure a pie chart may be the best case solution. My favourite use of pie charts is to compare the harmonic series and the series 1/x^2, but then again this latter example is not really a traditional pie chart.
chime 7y ago
This looks fantastic! Since it runs as a self-hosted jar, is there any way to change the UI? Put it in a frame, style with CSS, call some JS for automation or report selection with parameters?
- yuegui 7y ago
  The UI is not configurable at this moment. You can embed the full screen view in an <iframe> and then adjust URL parameters to select which report to load.
mmsimanga 7y ago
Another BI tool worth checking out is one called A Reporting Tool(ART)[0]. ART has been around for well over 10 years. Not the classiest looking piece of software but it is packed with features BI people will appreciate. For starters it integrates with JasperReports. This means you can design reports for printing using Jasper designer. It integrates quite a few Java libraries allowing you to create reports using Excel and PowerPoint. LDAP integration is built in and it has a nifty scheduler allowing you to publish reports to FTP locations. It really is a nifty tool. Like I said it doesn't compete with the modern tools in terms of looks but it packs a whole lot of features. You configure your own JDBC driver and there is a JDBC driver for most databases and data stores. [0]http://art.sourceforge.net http://art.sourceforge.net
yuegui 7y ago
Author here. Thanks everyone for using Poli. I am happy to answer any questions!
- chime 7y ago
  What was your inspiration / motivation behind this project? Are you the sole dev or is there a team behind you?
  - yuegui 7y ago
    The main motivation behind the project is that I'd like to have an easy-to-use SQL to Dashboard web application that I can use to solve my own problem. I did try search and use existing BI tools first but found that they are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough. I believe they are designed for more advanced user cases for a good reason and don't seem to suit my simpler needs. Thy's why I build Poli. Yes, I am the solo developer on this project.
    - chime 7y ago
      That's wonderful to hear. Will definitely give you feedback once I play around with the project in a few weeks.
- maxwin 7y ago
  Most of our teams are viewing BI from their phones. Is there plan to develop a mobile app or mobile friendly version
  - yuegui 7y ago
    I launched a simple mobile BI app before but it didn't get any traction so for Poli, there is no recent plan to make it mobile friendly :(
viraptor 7y ago
> No ETLs This seems to be listed as a feature, which I find confusing. Not everything lives in SQL databases. Some things you extract for example from external APIs. Is this basically "this is out of scope for the project", or it's a feature because we've got <alternative>?
- bollockitis 7y ago
  It does say in the description that this was built for “SQL lovers.”
I_am_tiberius 7y ago
Hackernews is so strange. The post some weeks ago with the title "Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use SQL reporting application built for SQL lovers" didn't get traction at all.
metsong 7y ago
Hi dude,are you a hacker? Can you do me a favor to break into a illegal web in china(it's a web of bitcoin trade,but it's forbidden by Chinese government). It's a very simple job to a professional man. Contact me: xuechs@gmail.com. I wish your reply , and get money together.
gitgud 7y ago
Does anyone know of a NoSQL alternative? Hopefull something compatible with MongoDB or Firestore...
vbsteven 7y ago
Nice project, congrats on shipping. I’ve taken a quick glance and looked at the code. It’s a Java/Spring Boot project which usually gets a lot of flak around here for “too much magic”. This project is written in a very clean style and seems to use a minimum of Spring. Mainly rest controllers, configuration and and dependency injection. No hibernate/orm or AOP stuff.
suyash 7y ago
Nice, believe you're using JavaFx for UI correct, very cool!
- pvorb 7y ago
  No, the UI uses React. I can't see where JavaFX is involved.

236 points by yuegui 7y ago

Would be useful to have some information how this compares with https://www.metabase.com/ https://www.metabase.com/ or https://meltano.com/ https://meltano.com/

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
Metabase can't be beaten in terms of looks and functionality but I do like this.
- massaman_yams 7y ago
  Superset's not the best in terms of looks, but it beats Metabase hands down for functionality.
  - polskibus 7y ago
    Which functionalities would you point out as the most important in Superset that are missing in Metabase?
    - massaman_yams 7y ago
      Depends heavily on your use case, but there are a lot of advanced features. From a review last year (so some of this may be outdated): - Broader datasource support - 20 sources in Superset, vs 12 in Metabase Superset supports: - view creation by users ('create table as'), as well as materialization - geo/GIS based visualizations - day over day, week over week, etc. charting; moving averages, etc. Superset is missing data catalog-like functions, which metabase has, though I didn't evaluate metabase's data catalog in depth. It also requires you to write SQL, where Metabase includes a query builder UI - though there was a rather strange difference in capabilities within Metabase between the SQL-based charting and the query builder UI.
- roelb 7y ago
  Don't agree, in the past metabase was good, now it's just getting worse. I was a big fan of metabase (to the point I deployed it in 4 companies and rolled it out for many people to use in their daily workflow). All was nice. Somewhere around 0.31 something changed in the internal dev/release flow. I get the feeling they have some kind of internal push to add unnecessary untested features which all look nice on paper, and work on a 5-row 5-column user tables. Until you actually use those features and all functionality fails miserably.. Had weird issues with it, which usually occurred after upgrades, on both small and bigger decently indexed DB's (pg and mysql), things like: - had sets of reports which all worked fine until they hit a 1001 rows.. and suddenly the UI had a react race condition. - X-Rays which silently fail and break the UI, while on the DB server you see the queries complete. - Deployed new versions which would hammer databases by distincting every column individually every hour, instead of handling statistics a bit more intelligently. Disabled that ofcourse. - Deployed versions in other countries, where the UI client-server latency caused the whole UI to break (probably the limits of setTimeout reached? :-)). If you check the github issues, it's just ignored problems and they are focus on releasing new functionality instead of fixing the issues. Doesn't really motivate to report anymore problems. They had one good thing: they would allow you to work in sql and write efficient queries, but clearly they decided it's time to remove the last good feature and now only want graphical query builders. If you use metabase: deploy it on a replica such it doesn't whack your prod DB. And take backups before upgrading, because there is no revert. I've spent enough time on Metabase problems, won't touch it anymore.
  - salsakran 7y ago
    I'm on the Metabase team - We've walked a fine line between fixing bugs, adding the features that our users have asked for and building out the BI interface we think the world should be using in 5 years. We don't always get it right, and I'm sorry if we broke things for you on the performance side. We will be spending a few of our development cycles after 0.33 to try to clear out our bug queue. One specific factual point I'd like to reply to however - SQL isn't going anywhere. If anything we're making it easier to both write plain SQL, use SQL templates or use our graphical interface on top of SQL query results in our next release (preview at https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-preview2 https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-pr...)
- westpfelia 7y ago
  Is there anyway to use a BI tool like Metabase and combine it with Qradar? I'm interested in being able to create useful reports.
tdhz77 7y ago
I’m still using informixDB so the bring your own jbdc connector maybe what I was looking for in Poli.

ccffph 7y ago

This looks great! I've been searching for something similar for a side project and I think I'll give Poli a try. Thank you.

apahwa 7y ago

why not use Superset?

massaman_yams 7y ago
Superset's very powerful, but other options can be easier for common use cases.
exabrial 7y ago
ever try to setup superset?
- FridgeSeal 7y ago
  Yeah I deployed it to Kubernetes the other day. I got it up in a few hours, and the included docker (compose) files are helpful, but it was a frustrating experience for a couple of reasons: * There is some legal issue with the Apache foundation that’s preventing them publishing to PyPi (details about this were lacking). * As a result, the provided dockerfile uses a very outdated version. * Installing any missing dependencies means essentially building your own dockerfile anyways: in my case, it was the bane of my life Snowflake DB dependencies... * Maybe it’s just me, but figuring out how to go from single-container ephemeral deployment to backend celery workers, external DB for persistence and a redos instance for caching (the recommended production setup) was frustrating to no end * There are hosted versions you can use. That said, we’re still going ahead with Superset, because it’s an improvement over the costly, ugly and over-opinionated alternative that is Tableau...
rb808 7y ago
yeah I was hoping for more feedback on Superset and with Druid as well. They look great but there's very little buzz about them.

cabaalis 7y ago

Wow, thanks! I have built many visualizations and dashboards using javascript and d3, and even just a couple of weeks ago was considering creating my own side-project to do just what this software does. I guess I'll be looking for a new project..

roywiggins 7y ago

This looks nice. We have been using http://redash.io http://redash.io for basic reporting dashboards, but this looks promising.

edgarvaldes 7y ago

Quite impressive, bookmarked for later use. What is the story behind Poli?

yuegui 7y ago
Thanks. The project is built mainly to solve my own problem that I often receive requests from the business side that they wanna access the data in the production system (We use different RDMS and Elasticsearch) so they can generate some simple charts in Excel and display to the customers. The request is not difficult but we just don't have a system for that. Since then, I have been trying different BI solutions like Power BI, Kibana and some other open source tools. They are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough to me. That's why I build Poli. I want it to be more focusing on easy to use, having an open license and the developer can use SQL to build reports easily for the end users or embed the reports in their systems.

donpdonp 7y ago

BI = Business Intelligence

Ygg2 7y ago
BI = Writing reports
- bollockitis 7y ago
  Generating reports!
  - opportune 7y ago
    BI = dashboards that are clicked through by consultants to manually generate reports that are read by management 5m every day while they take their morning shits

stewbrew 7y ago

It's a pity they use pie charts to show off their software. At least the don't show them in 3D. (And just to make it clear: there is no use case where pie charts are the best solution. At best they are an acceptable solution.)

listenallyall 7y ago
Even worse is the "Sales Ranking" in the first example, clearly the size or area of the entries is not proportional to the differences in sales, instead it is highly misleading to display the data as a perfect triangle. The TreeMap-esque "Qty by Product" is also useless -- is Cup larger or smaller than Glass? Stacked bars for "Location by Year" is another obfuscated mechanism for delivering "information" -- which was the best year for Warehouse?
solidasparagus 7y ago
What's wrong with pie charts? What would you suggest using when you want to see a percentage breakdown?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Use bars showing percentage. This way you can compare the values to a scale on the side and to each other. You can't see a difference easily on a pie chart without annotation. With enough values, you likely can't tell 5% from 10%, and difference between a fragment on the left from a fragment on the right. This is even worse in 3d pie chart which doesn't even preserve proportions in areas/angles, so splitting in 4 parts, bottom/top will be larger than left/right.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    I think it's better to say that "for most people there is a better alternative" than to say that pie charts should never be used. EDIT: If you are showing who ate which parts of a pizza (to be pedantic) I'm sure a pie chart may be the best case solution. My favourite use of pie charts is to compare the harmonic series and the series 1/x^2, but then again this latter example is not really a traditional pie chart.

chime 7y ago

This looks fantastic! Since it runs as a self-hosted jar, is there any way to change the UI? Put it in a frame, style with CSS, call some JS for automation or report selection with parameters?

yuegui 7y ago
The UI is not configurable at this moment. You can embed the full screen view in an <iframe> and then adjust URL parameters to select which report to load.

mmsimanga 7y ago

Another BI tool worth checking out is one called A Reporting Tool(ART)[0]. ART has been around for well over 10 years. Not the classiest looking piece of software but it is packed with features BI people will appreciate. For starters it integrates with JasperReports. This means you can design reports for printing using Jasper designer. It integrates quite a few Java libraries allowing you to create reports using Excel and PowerPoint. LDAP integration is built in and it has a nifty scheduler allowing you to publish reports to FTP locations. It really is a nifty tool. Like I said it doesn't compete with the modern tools in terms of looks but it packs a whole lot of features. You configure your own JDBC driver and there is a JDBC driver for most databases and data stores. [0]http://art.sourceforge.net http://art.sourceforge.net

yuegui 7y ago

Author here. Thanks everyone for using Poli. I am happy to answer any questions!

chime 7y ago
What was your inspiration / motivation behind this project? Are you the sole dev or is there a team behind you?
- yuegui 7y ago
  The main motivation behind the project is that I'd like to have an easy-to-use SQL to Dashboard web application that I can use to solve my own problem. I did try search and use existing BI tools first but found that they are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough. I believe they are designed for more advanced user cases for a good reason and don't seem to suit my simpler needs. Thy's why I build Poli. Yes, I am the solo developer on this project.
  - chime 7y ago
    That's wonderful to hear. Will definitely give you feedback once I play around with the project in a few weeks.
maxwin 7y ago
Most of our teams are viewing BI from their phones. Is there plan to develop a mobile app or mobile friendly version
- yuegui 7y ago
  I launched a simple mobile BI app before but it didn't get any traction so for Poli, there is no recent plan to make it mobile friendly :(

viraptor 7y ago

> No ETLs This seems to be listed as a feature, which I find confusing. Not everything lives in SQL databases. Some things you extract for example from external APIs. Is this basically "this is out of scope for the project", or it's a feature because we've got <alternative>?

bollockitis 7y ago
It does say in the description that this was built for “SQL lovers.”

I_am_tiberius 7y ago

Hackernews is so strange. The post some weeks ago with the title "Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use SQL reporting application built for SQL lovers" didn't get traction at all.

metsong 7y ago

Hi dude,are you a hacker? Can you do me a favor to break into a illegal web in china(it's a web of bitcoin trade,but it's forbidden by Chinese government). It's a very simple job to a professional man. Contact me: xuechs@gmail.com. I wish your reply , and get money together.

gitgud 7y ago

Does anyone know of a NoSQL alternative? Hopefull something compatible with MongoDB or Firestore...

vbsteven 7y ago

Nice project, congrats on shipping. I’ve taken a quick glance and looked at the code. It’s a Java/Spring Boot project which usually gets a lot of flak around here for “too much magic”. This project is written in a very clean style and seems to use a minimum of Spring. Mainly rest controllers, configuration and and dependency injection. No hibernate/orm or AOP stuff.

suyash 7y ago

Nice, believe you're using JavaFx for UI correct, very cool!

pvorb 7y ago
No, the UI uses React. I can't see where JavaFX is involved.