Over a decade ago i worked at a company with a BI tool that was exactly this, minus the AI of course. it was just PHP pages backed by embedded SQL built by a non engineer. anytime someone wanted a different slice of data, the person just copied an existing page and swapped out the sql and the column names. URL query string was used for the different parameters of the SQL statement, i forget if it was open to sql injection but it was an internal tool only. even after implementing a BI tool everyone still used the PHP pages because it was faster and easier to just bookmark the specific page you want with the data you wanted.
much like low code tools, most people dont want to mess with self serve BI. AI might help with that but i think the tool in the article opens the door for people creating slightly different versions of the same thing. also, claude is awful at visualizations. every one i see looks the same, crammed full of bad charts and too much text, poor color choices, and no real value in terms of story. still, this is an interesting implementation of that concept.
I built something similar in my previous job. The part that we were never able to figure out is how to guarantee that everybody is looking at the right numbers. Even if you have a comprehensive semantic layer, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong in putting metrics on a dashboard. This is why analysts are still needed, IMHO.
It would be been a more thorough analysis if they had accounted for the engineering teams’ salaries in time devoted to recreating this tool and maintaining it, rather than just tokens.
In the end, it would likely work out to more like 50% cost savings. Still good, but certainly more expensive than this article ultimately claims
You should also factor in that you have way more flexibility in the dashboards you create and everybody can build them easily, just by describing what they need.
Enterprise friends: what is snowflake and why did it have fine grained permissions for a whole company? I didn’t understand it from the snowflake website.
Snowflake is a Data Warehouse that is hosted in the cloud. The permission policies that you can define can become very complex - actually I find it's too complicated, I prefer BigQuery from GCP because of this reason.
if you want to operate this 'bucket of HTML files' over time, my startup https://valet.dev gives you the tools to host, govern, enforce policies, and secure what vibe coders create at your company.
The world of who can create software is growing (hello citizen developers!) but the challenges of operating and maintaining software is just as hard.
> We already run everything on Kubernetes, so deploying a service was mostly a matter of adding a Terraform module and a Helm chart.
Haha "we run everything on kubernetes, so deployment is a matter of using the least logical complement to it, and the lowest budget, flakiest and overbuilt alternative to plan manifests with none of the benefits of an operator"
Over a decade ago i worked at a company with a BI tool that was exactly this, minus the AI of course. it was just PHP pages backed by embedded SQL built by a non engineer. anytime someone wanted a different slice of data, the person just copied an existing page and swapped out the sql and the column names. URL query string was used for the different parameters of the SQL statement, i forget if it was open to sql injection but it was an internal tool only. even after implementing a BI tool everyone still used the PHP pages because it was faster and easier to just bookmark the specific page you want with the data you wanted.
much like low code tools, most people dont want to mess with self serve BI. AI might help with that but i think the tool in the article opens the door for people creating slightly different versions of the same thing. also, claude is awful at visualizations. every one i see looks the same, crammed full of bad charts and too much text, poor color choices, and no real value in terms of story. still, this is an interesting implementation of that concept.
I built something similar in my previous job. The part that we were never able to figure out is how to guarantee that everybody is looking at the right numbers. Even if you have a comprehensive semantic layer, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong in putting metrics on a dashboard. This is why analysts are still needed, IMHO.
It would be been a more thorough analysis if they had accounted for the engineering teams’ salaries in time devoted to recreating this tool and maintaining it, rather than just tokens.
In the end, it would likely work out to more like 50% cost savings. Still good, but certainly more expensive than this article ultimately claims
You should also factor in that you have way more flexibility in the dashboards you create and everybody can build them easily, just by describing what they need.
BI tools have always been borderline easy to replace IMO. So long as you have a decent data layer.
Were the dashboard used for insights or for making the managers feel good?
Enterprise friends: what is snowflake and why did it have fine grained permissions for a whole company? I didn’t understand it from the snowflake website.
Snowflake is a Data Warehouse that is hosted in the cloud. The permission policies that you can define can become very complex - actually I find it's too complicated, I prefer BigQuery from GCP because of this reason.
Thanks!
At least replace it with dbt charts rather than a whole new vibe coded mess.
if you want to operate this 'bucket of HTML files' over time, my startup https://valet.dev gives you the tools to host, govern, enforce policies, and secure what vibe coders create at your company.
The world of who can create software is growing (hello citizen developers!) but the challenges of operating and maintaining software is just as hard.
This is very similar to the open-source platform I’ve been building called Pando (https://github.com/trypando/pando)
Validating to see others trying to solve this problem too!
What is Looker?
Multi billion 'Business intelligence' tool now from Google; more or less a fancy charting library with some access controls.
Damn sounds like easy money.
If 12 month enterprise sales cycles sounds like easy money then sure.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=looker
“Looker is Google Cloud agentic business intelligence and embedded analytics platform.”
Something of the past according to the author.
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I guess I'm not reading this...
AI wrote this
Criticize the content, not the means of creation.
Honestly do not care that the words are vaguely AI tinted. The semantic content is not AI, it's not slop.
Put it this way: would you rather this article didn't exist, or had less detail? Because that's the alternative in many cases.
It is a pretty good article. If AI wrote it then good for AI.
If it was so good, why do you have nothing to say about the content?
> We already run everything on Kubernetes, so deploying a service was mostly a matter of adding a Terraform module and a Helm chart.
Haha "we run everything on kubernetes, so deployment is a matter of using the least logical complement to it, and the lowest budget, flakiest and overbuilt alternative to plan manifests with none of the benefits of an operator"
WOW