I've been disappointed with the lack of good BI tools for years. Tableau is too enterprisey. PowerBI has a Windows taint that makes it impractical, most of the others just plain suck.
Finally, a company developed a BI tool that gives standalone developers a way to build dashboards quickly and easily and that also scales to an enterprise level.
Not surprisingly, they also just received a shipload of venture funding. I've been hanging waiting for the next good IPO and these folks just may be the one.
They're also open source on Github. I'm going to be using Metabase as my visualization tool on the Database Security series I'm writing for Snowflake. After spending much of my career writing UIs, I've realized that a well-designed dashboard beats UI code in richness and maintainability any day. Unless you're in the business of building UIs and you get paid for it, it isn't worth the effort. A well-designed dashboard with hooks to 3rd party apps beats an in-house UI any day.
Unlike every other BI tool on the market I've tried, it couldn't be easier to jumpstart work in Metabase, because it uses Docker.
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name metabase metabase/metabaseMaybe after my Snowflake Security Project, I'll start contributing to their open-source efforts.
They have an excellent Youtube tutorial here: https://youtu.be/LJ0l2HZ8Lp8.
Viewing the Local Metabase Instance
Go to the docker URL and login:
http://localhost:3000/
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