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by mritchie712 850 days ago
I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me:

1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users)

2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead

3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod

4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all the data there

5. Queries were timing out against Snowflake in Blazer (never figured out the problem here, maybe the ruby gem for Snowflake was buggy?)

6. Set up Metabase instead, which worked fine, but non-technical people could never really use it.

(note: I'm a founder, shameless plug below)

This felt like a lot of work. I just wanted a place to dump all my data and easily create reports. Bonus points if non-technical people could do the same. That's what we're going for with Definite (https://www.definite.app/)

1. Built-in data warehouse - We spin up a duckdb database for you

2. 500+ connectors (e.g. Postgres, Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc.) - You don't need to buy a separate ETL, it's also built-in

3. Semantic layer - Define dimensions, measures, and joins using SQL in one place. We have pre-built models for all the sources we support (e.g. the Stripe model already has measures for MRR, churn, etc.)

4. Simple BI - Build a table with the data you want and generate visuals off that table. Works like a pivot table, if you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Definite.

I'm mike@definite.app if anyone wants help getting set up.

6 comments

This is one of the better landing pages for a product I’ve seen, it’s so succinct. Nicely done. I’m going to actually evaluate your product today as a result
I know the market you are targeting with your product plug and the problems you point out are real challenges that businesses have.

But the lack of all of these features is what I absolutely love about Heroku Dataclips and products inspired by it. It does "run SQL on my DB and give me a shareable chart" more easily and effectively than any BI tool I've ever used.

It's such an incredible mini-product that made Heroku Postgres a joy to use (when I used to use Heroku), and what makes me excited about something like Blazer.

How are those 500+ data source connectors are implemented? Do you use 3rd party APIs? Im always curious about that.
Great question. We're using Meltano (https://hub.meltano.com/extractors), so no third party (we host the meltano jobs on our infra for you).
Wow wasn't aware of such connectors exist. Thought you must pay for something like that. CDATA (https://www.cdata.com/connect/connectors/) charges a fortune for connectors.
Can it handle loading data from let's say 100 pg databases (of the same schema but different tenants) and query them as if all the data was in a single database?

I think that's my main issue with tools like this.

> Set up Metabase instead but...

I've been trying to retire metabase but our non technical people love it too much. everyone from marketing to finance has dashboards and alerts and reports.

Out of curiosity, what's the motivation behind retiring metabase? (especially if people love it as you say)
Did they create the dashboards though? The problem I had is every time they wanted some small change, they needed to bother someone that knew SQL and they couldn't create one from scratch.

What were you looking to replace it with?

Nice, clear, concise demo.