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by saadatq 1756 days ago
> In our experience, the BI layer is the weakest part of the modern data stack. The BI layer has a poor developer experience, and decision makers don’t really like the outputs they get. It turns out, these two issues are closely related. The drag and drop experience is so slow and low-leverage that the only way to get all the content on the page is to push a lot of cognitive load onto the end user: global filters, drill down modals, grids of charts without context. Like most users, business people hate that shit. And because the production process isn’t in code, the outputs are hard to version control and test—so dashboards break, results are internally inconsistent, and so on, in just the way that software would suck if you didn’t version control and test it.

If I could upvote this a 100 times, I would. I've felt this pain everyday with Looker, Mode, Metabase, every other BI tool that I've tried.
2 comments
amcaskill 1756 days ago
Haha thank you! Unfortunately I think a lot of people are suffering under the status quo.
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Aeolun 1753 days ago
We can just teach all the people that want this data SQL?
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amcaskill 1750 days ago
This is a fair point!

YMMV, but in our experience the vast majority of the hours logged in the 'self-serve' pivot table interface of a BI system come from folks who actually do know SQL and have the word analyst in their title.

When you look at session data on non-technical people doing things with those pivot table interfaces, they are almost never doing the 'complex exploratory analysis' that BI vendors advertise. They are either doing sequential lookups of individual records, or they are putting together a simple data pull so that they can do something in a spreadsheet.

We think we can address the bulk of these use cases by providing two components: a lightweight pivot table, and a 'download to excel' button. These would be components like any other chart or graph. Outputs.

We think a pivot table is a nice output for some situations, we just don't think your data team should have to use a pivot table interface to produce the whole reporting system.

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