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by Wilduck 850 days ago
Is Superset a decent tool if you're just a single person doing data analysis? Say I have a handful of sqlite databases, and just want to be able to develop some queries / charts. I was looking into Tableau / Power BI / Superset, and all of them seemed pretty heavyweight for a single user, and none of them seemed super easy to get setup locally.

Any recommendations for a good piece of software for the single user case? Or a more convenient way to run the heavyweight tools?

2 comments

If you are doing data analysis I don't think any of the 3 pieces of software you mentioned are going to be that helpful.

I see these products as tools for data visualization and reporting i.e. presenting prepared datasets to users in a visually appealing way. They aren't as well suited for serious analytics.

I can't comment on Superset or Tableau but I am familiar with Power BI (it has been rolled out across my org), the type of statistics you can do with it are fairly rudimentary. If you need to do any thing beyond summarizing (counts, averages, min, max etc). It is not particularly easy.

For data analysis I use SAS or R. This software allows you do things like multivariate regression, timeseries forecasting, PCA, Cluster analysis etc. There is also plotting capability.

Both these products are kind of old school, I've been using them since early 2000's, the "new school" seems to be Python. Pretty much all the recent data science people in my organization use Python. Particularly Pandas and libraries like Seaborn (https://seaborn.pydata.org/).

The "power" users of Power BI in my organization tend to be finance/HR people for use cases like drill down into cost figures or Interactively presenting KPI's and other headline figures to management things like that.

Tableau is the best, most powerful, most mature of the three, most feature complete and easiest of the three. I think they give you a 30 day trial.

This is a single user application, unless you make it part of your built application.

> This is a single user application

K8s installation instructions: https://superset.apache.org/docs/installation/running-on-kub...

RBAC configuration: https://superset.apache.org/docs/security/#rest-api-for-user...

I'll say PowerBI has the potential to be more powerful, but you need to love the whole M and DAX languages eco system. And the integration with python and R it's not that bad.

But if your vis are with the scope of native Tableau capabilities, then Tableau it's more friendly and gets less in the way of you and your work.

Superset isn't a single user application?
Ah, sure