[written-beyond]

This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation.

I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway.

I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case is only stronger in this age of LLMs.

We get so involved with our products we forget that our customers are humans too. Nobody wants another account to manage or remember. Analytics and alerts should be push based, configurable reports should get auto generated and sent to your inbox, alerts should be pushed via notifications or emails and customers should have an option to build their own dashboard with something like this.

Sane defaults make sense but location matters just as much.

[oogali]

> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.

Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].

In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.

In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.

Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports

[skeeter2020]

My best friend from early uni days did a co-op with Crystal Services, and he's been with them for their entire history through Seagate Software, Crystal Decisions, BusinessObjects (and relocating from Canada to France) and then SAP. I myself have had 2 temporary retirements, at least 4 different careers and countless jobs in that time, and it's wild to know someone who has the same internal drive but has satisfied it with a much more linear path (though you could definitely argue he's seen just as much change as me). From employee ~50 to ~100,050!

[yesbabyyes]

This brings me back! My first job was at the Norwegian ERP Agresso, now part of Unit4. I started as a support technician, which was a experience since around the time, '97-'98, everyone was moving from Sybase/Ingres/Informix etc, to either MSSQL or Oracle. I got to interact with those older database systems and install and export/import data to systems running on eg Oracle across parallel Solaris servers at SAAB Areospace and Windows NT running on DEC Alpha at Ericsson, among other more vanilla deployments.

I was a developer albeit not professionally, and my boss gave me the opportunity to develop the integration between Agresso and Crystal Reports, my first professional development project, for which I am still grateful. It was a DLL written in C++ and I imagine they shipped that for quite a while after I left for greener pastures.

I was already a free software and Linux enthusiast, so I did a vain skunkworks attempt at getting Agresso to run with MySQL, which failed, but my Linux server in the office came in handy when I needed some extra software in the field--I asked a colleague to put a CD in the server so I could download it to the client site some 500 km away, and deliver on the migration.

[written-beyond]

Aaaaaah I had a professor rave about Crystal Reports once. Didn't know it had such gilded history.

[AgharaShyam]

100% agreed regarding shipping a read-replica, for any sufficiently complex enterprise app (ERP, CRM, accounting, etc.).

Customers need it to build custom reports, archive data into a warehouse, drive downstream systems (notifications, audits, compliance), and answer edge-case questions you didn’t anticipate.

Because of that, I generally prefer these patterns over a half-baked built-in analytics UI or an opinionated REST API:

Provide a read replica or CDC stream. Let sophisticated customers handle authz, modelling, and queries themselves. This gets harder with multi-tenant DBs.

Optionally offer a hosted Data API, using something like -- PostgREST / Hasura / Microsoft DAB. You handle permissions and safety, but stay largely un-opinionated about access patterns.

Any built-in metrics or analytics layer will always miss edge cases.

With AI agents becoming first-class consumers of enterprise data, direct read access is going to be non-negotiable.

Also, I predict the days of charging customers to access their own goddamn data, behind rate-limited + metered REST APIs are behind us.

[conormccarter]

I fully agree in spirit, but in practice, read-replica's have some edge cases that are hard to control for. Namely, the incentives aren't fully aligned between the database host and consumer, and that dynamic can lead to some difficult resourcing decisions for the DB host. Whereas an API can be rate limited or underlying API queries can be optimized (however frustrating that might be for consumers).

The CDC stream option you flagged is more viable in my (admittedly biased) opinion. At my company (Prequel) our entire pitch is basically "you should give your customer's a live replica of their data in whatever data platform they want it in" (and let us handle the cross-platform compatibility & multi-tenant DB challenges).

I think this problem could also be a killer use case for Open Table Formats, where the read-replica architecture can be mirrored but the cost of reader compute can be assumed by the data consumer.

To your point, this is only going to be more important with what will likely be a dramatic increase in AI agent data consumption.

[mitjam]

1999-2000, the company I worked with gave a smallish number of key users full read rights to the SAP minus HR, briefly after introducing SAP to the global supply chain of that company. The key users came from all orgs using SAP, basically every department had one or two key users.

I was part of this and "saw the light". We had such a great visibility into all the processes, it was unreal. It tremendously sped-up cross-org initiatives.

Today, I guess, only agents get that privilege.

[jorin]

hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards. Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere. We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.

[written-beyond]

It would be a game changer, very interesting to see this grow. How did you get your PDF generation so good?

[jorin]

happy to hear that! pdfs are generated in a headless chrome in the same docker container as shaper itself using chromedp.

[owlstuffing]

> I think we lost the plot as an industry

I get your point, but generally with most enterprise-scale apps you really don’t want your transactional DB doubling as your data warehouse. The “push-based” operation should be limited to moving data from your tx environment to your analytical one.

Of course, if the “analytics” are limited to simple static reports, then a data warehouse is overkill.

[mrits]

Customers don’t want to learn your schema or deal with your clever optimizations either. If you expose a DB make sure you abstract everything away in a view and treat it like a versioned API.

[written-beyond]

The best example for this are iot devices that share their data. Instead of reinventing the wheel for a dashboard for each customer just give them some docs and restricted access via a replica.

[matsz]

> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.

A layer on top of the database to account for auth/etc. would be necessary anyways. Could be achieved to some degree with views, but I'd prefer an approach where you choose the publicly available data explicitly.

GraphQL almost delivered on that dream. Something more opinionated would've been much better, though.

[written-beyond]

That's exactly what I meant. It's a specific replica instance with it's own security etc. but not necessarily a separate API you try to integrate too. APIs can stay for writes, but for reads you have the db