from Hacker News

I made advanced BI queries with Scratch puzzle pieces

by misterdata on 7/17/22, 7:41 PM with 20 comments

• by AlphaWeaver on 7/18/22, 2:08 AM

  I'd like to take a moment to appreciate that the first thing I saw on this page was a GIF explaining exactly what the blog post was talking about, but visually. I didn't even have to scroll down, and 60 seconds later, I had a much better idea of what this post was communicating.

• by unityByFreedom on 7/18/22, 2:56 AM

  I'm surprised there's no mention of Ab Initio, which looks like [1], in these threads. AFAIK they were the pioneer in BI ETL while everyone else was copying.

  Then again, they are pretty secretive, and that may be why I can't find any videos of the tool itself in use (edit here's one [3]), maybe due to copyright takedown requests.

  That software was the successor of Thinking Machines [2], which was the hot AI company of the 80s AI boom. The software itself is quite good at parallelizing logic. And, the graphical front-end makes it easy for non-programmers to pick up the tool.

  [1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FwFkbVFfnGQ/S1qa8lgcw4I/AAAAAAAAA...

  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation

  [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlZlpsa0jyA

• by qsort on 7/17/22, 9:24 PM

  Probably a bit of a tangent, but the BI world sure loves their no-code tools. It's one of the few sub-industries where they really took hold.

• by cptroot on 7/17/22, 9:27 PM

  Thanks for making a whole blog post out of the anecdote mentioned yesterday. Really excellent to see the whole story!

• by BbzzbB on 7/18/22, 12:11 AM

  I hoped it was a follow up on yesterday's comment on this. Thanks for sharing, Mr misterdata!

• by p_l on 7/18/22, 1:41 AM

  Few years ago I essentially went the same way though only up to a demo (because someone else got the contract) , but the target was to modify the ETL pipeline that before was implemented in hard coded T-SQL stored procedures and a Java app whose source code was evidently lost and recreated with disassembler.

  The constructs in Blockly would have been used to generate the transform queries that turned input data into all kinds of summaries in snowflake schema

• by ngloom on 7/18/22, 8:49 AM

  Old iron, 666 ~