from Hacker News

Show HN: Regrail – Open-Source, Visual Data Transformation and Querying Tool

by sethkim on 6/15/23, 8:39 PM with 2 comments

As a software engineer, it's frustrating to see those who can't code stuck with spreadsheets as their most powerful data tool. This is especially true when there is such a thin layer that exists to access arbitrarily powerful data and AI/ML tools (typically just Python and pandas/SQL).

I built Regrail last year to demonstrate a visual, procedural tool that abstracts the primitives of data engineering. It uses a block-based editor that allows users to see the changes they are making to tables step by step. You can think of it like a visual DAG builder.

I believe that data literacy is fundamental to human progress, and I'd love to see a world where a more advanced data tool than Google Sheets is available to the general public and working with data can be as fun and collaborative as coding or design. Regrail may be a good starting point for this and I'd love to turn it into a community project to get it to a v1.0 state. Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to get involved.

  • by rebataur on 6/18/23, 12:28 PM

    This is nice, thanks for posting this. we are building an opensource datascience tool with similar vision as yours, and could certainly use something like this as initial data wrangling and preparation stage. https://github.com/rebataur/rapidium
  • by hermitcrab on 6/18/23, 1:37 PM

    There are quite a few tools in this space already, including Easy Data Transform, Alteryx, Knime and Tableau Data Prep.