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Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization
- mrwnmonm 7y agoWow, this is great.
- eloff 7y agoI want to find a way to incorporate this into a dashboard for suits. Seems like it would let them solve a lot of their own requests - in theory. In a lot of companies they'd probably still make requests to create the graphs and sql queries for them. Give a suit a fish and he's happy for a day. Teach a suit to fish and he'll still be back tomorrow for his fish. Who wants to fish when you can get a code monkey to do it for you.
- mythrwy 7y agoI have experience with this. Give a powerful SQL editor to a suit and find your data integrity borked beyond repair.
- striking 7y agoRead only?
- tracker1 7y agoFor this, could probably dump/replicate to SQLite for archive/backup/point in time... Or one-way replicate for reports.
- eloff 7y agoI've used this strategy with a read only replica. It also protects the database from long running and inefficient queries. Highly recommend doing this if you have the budget for it.
- amylene 7y agoThis is how PowerBI, from Microsoft, works. It copies the data into local RAM (or on a cloud machine that also runs the dataviz)
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- samplatt 7y agoThis is literally what SSRI and PowerBI was invented for. Still requires codemonkies to prepare the data, but at least it cuts down on the rate of requests by allowing them to massage filters by themselves.
- jpau 7y agoSuccess here is possible. I didn't believe it until I saw it :) I was in a regional strategy-esque team for Uber Eats. Eats have a nicely curated data warehouse of core operational data. They also have excellent, free, self-paced SQL training built around that same data (a tailored version of https://academy.vertabelo.com/ https://academy.vertabelo.com/). So you learn both how SQL works and how your data is structured at the same time. You'd be surprised how many junior-mid level suits are eager to pick this up. The result is very useful. Some non-technical folk picked this up on the side in just a few weeks. They understood the limitations and caveats needed to use the data well. They needed very limited assistance here-and-there. It was purely magical how they picked up both the data and the system.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago> Give a suit a fish and he's happy for a day. Teach a suit to fish and he'll still be back tomorrow for his fish. With the exception of a very few competent suits I have known... this is so spot on! Love it! Beautifully put!
- tracker1 7y agoThe funny thing to me is always how Oracle is the odd duck, requiring a specific client install to use.. where as most other databases have established protocols with open client library implementations.
- colordrops 7y agoSimilar to Microsoft's lock-in strategy when they were still the dominant player.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIt's almost the opposite of the Microsoft's strategy by then. Microsoft made it easy for anybody to depend on their software, Oracle goes out of their way to make it harder.
- sigzero 7y agoWe use Oracle at work but I don't use any Oracle clients because you can connect to it use JDBC.
- tracker1 7y agoJDBC doesn't require the oracle client software to be installed? -- edit Apparently Java is the one platform that Oracle supports without a separate driver install... Though their driver is probably itself written in Java.
- cetra3 7y agoAlso see metabase: https://www.metabase.com/ https://www.metabase.com/ We use this to embed some nice dashboards & run queries to great effect. A very powerful tool!
- Jommi 7y agoHow does this fair with something like Cluvio?
- te_chris 7y agoMetabase is great, I just wish it would support BigQuery properly as currently you need to connect to each dataset individually. Still, it’s the best OSS software tool I’ve used, I think. Deploy the container to whatever, give it be creds, done.
- sfsylvester 7y agoIs there a recommended tool for BigQuery? Both this and Falcon look great, but my company's pretty wedded to BigQuery for the moment.
- seektable 6y agoSeekTable also can use BigQuery as a data source, however it is more about reports sharing and quick ad-hoc queries - to make this possible data source should be configured first.
- te_chris 7y agoAll the commercial ones support it, but most of them are expensive. Mode has a free plan which allows you to connect to BQ, run queries and then analyze the result sets in Jupyter. It's pretty cool for smaller stuff https://mode.com/compare-plans/ https://mode.com/compare-plans/
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- kthejoker2 7y agoNot to be confused with https://github.com/uwdata/falcon https://github.com/uwdata/falcon Another interactive data visualization tool named Falcon. Both are pretty sweet.
- domoritz 7y agoAuthor of uwdata/falcon here. I'm glad to hear you like the tool we've built.
- zelphirkalt 7y agoNot to be confused with the API framework for Python. The list probably goes on. It's bad naming.
- mrwebmaster 7y agoNo Linux?
- edoceo 7y agoYes Linux! It's Electron (which runs on Linux)
- rhabarba 7y agoStill covering most of the non-HN world.
- nicolaskruchten 7y agoReadMe updated to include Linux link!
- chriddyp 7y agoHello HN! Nice to see this up here. Chris here, cofounder of Plotly. Falcon is open source and works without an internet connection or a Plotly Chart Studio account. Falcon wires together our graphing library plotly.js (https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/ https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js/), the plotly.js chart editor (https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor), Electron, and some open source NPM packages for connecting to databases. Just FYI - As a company (Plotly), we're spending most of our development effort these days on Dash Open Source (https://github.com/plotly/dash https://github.com/plotly/dash) and Dash Enterprise (https://plotly.com/dash https://plotly.com/dash). Truth be told, we found that most companies we worked with preferred to own the analytical backend. We also heard many stories of organizations running into roadblocks with off-the-shelf SQL or BI tools (Falcon included!). Our approach with Dash is to provide the visualization and application primitives so that you could build your own tailor-made dashboards, analytical apps, or yes, even SQL editors. If you want to read more about where we're at, here's an essay we wrote last week on Dash: https://medium.com/plotly/dash-is-react-for-python-r-and-julia-c75822d1cc24 https://medium.com/plotly/dash-is-react-for-python-r-and-jul...
- srameshc 7y agoI love it. The fact that one tool and with separate tabs you can connect to multiple database is the best feature. Thank you.
- fantyoon 7y agoAny reason the Github page advertises Windows and Mac but not Linux? I saw that its built in Javascript and checked the releases page,you guys built a Linux version too. Is it just something that, while possible, you don't want to support officially with more than a build?
- nicolaskruchten 7y agoJust an oversight :)
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- that_girl 7y agoHey, looks great! Can't wait to try it out. I wish I could connect to Snowflake.
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- sandGorgon 7y agoThis is a cool project - however Mac and Windows only...most likely because they are creating the toolchain for this. I would pay money to get something like this inside vscode - which is an ecosystem that works great on all platforms and provides the hooks to build something like this. On that note, I think microsoft is making a mistake by not creating an app store of sorts for vscode. VsCode is as good a desktop developer marketplace as the play store is for mobile apps. I wish that plotly had built this inside jupyter (where their Dash product competes against Streamlit) or vscode. Building a desktop installer toolchain from scratch, does not make sense.
- Spiritus 7y agoApparently it does support Linux as well. At least according to some of other comments here.
- dhruvkar 7y agoIt does, I'm running it on Ubuntu. https://github.com/plotly/falcon/releases https://github.com/plotly/falcon/releases
- nicolaskruchten 7y agoThe missing link to the Linux AppImage was an oversight... fixed now that I'm back at my desk :) And yes, the desktop-app build toolchain is a pain to maintain.
- jaxn 7y agoDoes anyone know if the visualizations are savable/shareable? I'd love to stop pasting screenshots in slacj
- rhabarba 7y ago> built with Electron No, thank you. I’m not curious enough to install a security risk.
- edshiro 7y agoThis looks great! I had never heard of Dash either and it seems it is precisely the tool we need at our startup to do data visualisation. Awesome work. Will check all this out during the week-end.
- six2seven 7y agoAlso see: Apache Superset [0] -- this one looks really like a fully fledged data exploration and visualisation suite, being a possible free and open source alternative to Microsoft Power BI [1]. Using the official / own image can be also deployed as a service running in a local infrastructure. Would be curious for a comparison between all the mentioned data vis suites in this thread actually. [0] https://superset.apache.org https://superset.apache.org [1] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
- kfk 7y agoQuick comparison: 1) Redash and Falcon focus on people that want to do visualizations on top of SQL 2) Superset, Tableau and PowerBI focus on people that want to do visualizations with a UI 3) Metabase and SeekTable focus on people that want to do quick analysis (they are the closest to an Excel replacement) I have been using group 2) for 3 something years, I am not too excited by them, Superset is cool, Tableau and PowerBI value has been blown out of proportion by marketing. Group 3) is very promising but for some reason more niche although because of their pricing structure they scale as well as Excel (i.e. you can have thousands of users building stuff in Metabase no problem). Group 1) not sure what to say there, I guess it would be my favorite but SQL becomes messy after the first join. The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. Without a database, data prep and security setup they are more or less fancy toys. Unfortunately very few companies understand how to set all of this up in a way that users can actually work with it. So I keep seeing a lot of half done, super expensive, setups in Tableau and PowerBI that have not delivered what they were promising. Also, I agree with chriddyp that most companies would rather own their analytics for stuff that is customer facing. For internal facing dashboards the dashboarding BI tools are OK (although I lean more on group 3) than group 2)).
- seektable 6y ago> The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. so true! Only exception is maybe CSV data. Re SeekTable: it also supports usage scenario when data sources ('cubes') are configured by power user (with some IT background), and shares cubes/reports to others that use simple web UI to create their own reports - and this requires paid subscription for publisher only ($25/mo).
- rmrten 7y agoLooks great!
- nchase 7y agoWhat command line tools do people use to plot data? I'd love to be able to write some SQL and pipe to CSV or directly to a tool that will just spit out a PNG or SVG that has the data plotted. Is gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info http://www.gnuplot.info) the thing for this?
- nchase 7y agoHere's a thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040
- snidane 7y agoI tried but can't connect to any of my databases. Why not just support odbc/jdbc configurations? Guys, this should be a solved problem.
- escot 7y agoThere are surprisingly few desktop apps for basic sql -> charts, so I was happy to stumble on Falcon. It's similar to their web offering (or Periscope, Looker, etc) and works quite well (regardless of a few UI quirks).
- ata239 7y agoVery nice
- ssaunier_ 7y agoFor those on Rails, do yourself a favor and add this great engine: https://github.com/ankane/blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer Life-changing!