I really, really like your idea with Evidence. I long for a mode in Metabase that’s like a “notebook mode”, where the main focus is narrative and it’s ornamented with viz, rather than the other way around.
I want to be able to publish this notebook when I’m done and then be able to hand that around, the same concept that you’ve built Evidence around. I think that’s a very good idea, so thanks.
The main thing keeping me from switching is that Metabase’s query builder and visualizations are too good for 95% of my work. It’s hard to picture going back to writing _all_ the SQL.
I hear that. We're making a lot of progress on reducing the amount of sql you need to write, keeping it DRY etc. Making the dev experience really buttery and high leverage is definitely a priority.
Here are a few of the things we're working on in that regard:
1. Making our components issue their own queries so that you don't need to write full sql expressions, just fragments when you're defining the chart you want.
2. Improving intellisense -- right now you get "slash commands" and snippets in our vscode extension to invoke components (which are really sweet), but we're aiming to get to a full intellisense type of experience.
3. Supporting external metrics layers where it makes sense. We've got some users using Cube, we're interested in Malloy, and the dbt semantic layer, those types of things.
One of our team members is very keen on building something he calls "Evidence studio", sort of a wsywig you could invoke during development for generating basic queries, setting up charts etc. that syncs the components into their text representation. That'd be further off though :)
Platforms like this are always pretty funny. It's basically a gateway drug to their cloud platform (which isn't free) that they hope you use, but then they keep it open source so that they don't have to pay salaries to w2 employees. Smart thinkin'!
For anyone who is interested in our cloud service, it's an easy way to put your project online, keep it up to date with your data, and place it behind access control.
For many organizations, hosting Evidence in their own infrastructure is easy enough, but if you don't want to manage that, we are happy to manage it for you.
It is not free (that's how we pay the salaries), but pricing is available here:
Right now I'm heavily into Grafana but when it comes to BI it kinda falls flat, I regularly have to fall back to using the Plotly plugin to create the charts (but it's getting better, at least you can do a normal scatter or bar chart out of the box since version 8. Labeling the axes is still a problem though). Navigation is also problematic, like jumping to a source table takes a lot of effort to make (basically you have to create a new dashboard and do some hyperlinking instead of there being a ready to go "view source data" button). I feel like there's a lot of friction to get Grafana to do BI, but I've also invested so much time in it I'm afraid to jump ship...
Superset looked good, but operating superset quickly runs into the same Python issues all Python software suffers from.
Sometimes it would just break for no apparent reason. Configuring it was a nightmare of magic Python code and unclear settings. Trying to use plugins was equally painful: due to the poor boundary separating the applications dependencies from the plugins dependencies, adding a db connector could just bork the whole application.
Very sound advice. I started the setup process for Superset, and it's even worse on Windows. Contrast that to Superset which is a single .jar file and worked instantly.
What do people use for an "analytics.js" for reporting events with common items like campaign data, user device and user profile measurements, and related from browsers and devices?
