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by CMCDragonkai 784 days ago
I've been trying to get a platform to create dashboards where some data comes from spreadsheets and some data comes from databases. Something like a notebook interface crossed with a grafana interface while also enabling forms for input is sorely missing. While it can be stitched together, speed/performance and flexibility (in terms of JS or Python) seems to be lacking atm.

I want to use such a thing to create internal dashboards similar to retool.

3 comments

Does it need to be live (i.e when database or underlying spreadsheet updates does it need to be reflected in real time on the dashboard) or are you ok with static display.

Live updating data is a pain I've messed around using javascript to force refresh html iframes on a timer. But I was never really satisfied with this. I've heard you can do things with websockets but that is starting to get too complicated for me (I'm not a programmer).

For static stuff one of the data scientists in my org pointed me to Streamlit (https://streamlit.io/) it's a python package I found very easy to use. Can easily combine SQL with CSV imports and display them all on one dashboard. Can use forms toggle butotns etc to control the display.

You can do that today with PySheets. On the PySheets landing page, you can find a live example. The data comes directly out of a sheet that uses a service to convert metrics into charts. For example, one of the three charts shown on https://pysheets.app/#Traction is directly embedded as an iframe from https://pysheets.app/embed?U=uXNuCGO2JU1E5aL7zcOh&k=C12. If I rerun the sheet that produces the charts, the PySheets landing page updates automatically with the latest data.
You should try http://rowzero.io. We connect directly to DBs and data warehouses, support Python natively, and scale up to hundreds of millions of rows.

Lots of people use us for dashboards.