from Hacker News

Show HN: Open-source BI and analytics for engineers

by louisjoejordan on 5/15/24, 2:02 PM with 75 comments

We are building Quary (https://quary.dev), an engineer-first BI/analytics product. You can find our repo at https://github.com/quarylabs/quary and our website at https://www.quary.dev/. There’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hO65_lkGU

As engineers who have worked on data at startups and Amazon, we were frustrated by self-serve BI tools. They seemed dumbed down and they always required us to abandon our local dev tools we know and love (e.g. copilot, git). For us and for everyone we speak to, they end up being a mess.

Based on this, we decided there was a need for engineer-oriented BI and analytics software.

Quary solves these pain points by bringing standard software practices (version control, testing, refactoring, ci/cd, open-source, etc.) to the BI and analytics workflow.

We integrate with many databases, but we’re showcasing our slick Supabase integration, because it: (1) keeps your data safe by running on your machine without data flowing through our servers; and (2) enables you to quickly build an analytics layer on top of your Supabase Postgres instances. Check out our Supabase guide: https://www.quary.dev/docs/quickstart-supabase

What we’re launching today is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. We plan to keep the developer core open source and add paid features like a web platform to easily share data models (per-seat pricing), and an orchestration engine to materialize your data models.

Please try Quary at https://quary.dev and let us know what you think! We're excited to put the power of BI and analytics into the hands of engineers.

  • by scapecast on 5/16/24, 6:06 AM

    Congrats on the launch!

    I've built analytics products, and the good thing about dashboards is that there's budget for them. People like eye-candy, and are willing to pay for it. I like how you picked Postgres as your initial database, because I think it's still the #1 databases for analyics (even though it's OLTP) that no one talks about.

    The three products where I think you may want to write short comparison pages are:

    - Rill - Preset - Metabase

    And I'd take a hard look at ClickHouse as your next database. They're missing a dashboard partner. And I think they're users are much more engineering-centric and therefore a good fit for you than the analytics crowd around Snowflake.

  • by rodolphoarruda on 5/15/24, 8:07 PM

    Side comment: what an interesting landing page it has. That Slack CAT button right within the fold is a good idea. A walkthrough and a way to schedule a meeting with the founders. This is very straightforward. Good luck!

  • by huy on 5/16/24, 4:15 AM

    Congrats on the launch!

    I think here's a few players in this space (dev-friendly BI tool) already: - Holistics.io - Lightdash - Hashboard

    These tools all allow analysts to use both/either a local/cloud IDE to write analytics logic, and check in to Git version control.

    How do you plan to differentiate with them?

  • by igeligel_dev on 5/15/24, 7:01 PM

    All these comments ask for comparisons. It might be worth creating some alternative pages like podia do [1]. It could be helpful for your growth.

    Seems like a cool project!

    [1] https://www.podia.com/podia-alternatives

  • by sails on 5/16/24, 2:04 PM

    Very cool!

    Do you anticipate going more towards improving the data modelling capabilities (take on dbt et al) or more towards Business Intelligence (dashboards then hosting then drag&drop query builder all the way until the dreaded pdf export)

    Something that is overlooked in the dbt direction is how complex data models get. BI nothing seems overlooked, it is just hard!

    I like that you have a clear anti-ICP [dbt customers, analysts]. This keeps you clear of the BI/DWH space. I do wonder how you avoid getting stuck in the BI tar pit [], or avoid getting stuck in the dbt middleware zone. Maybe with a core focus on engineers getting further and further without needing a BI/data team!

    []https://twitter.com/generick_ez/status/1782844341674786952

  • by swaraj on 5/16/24, 5:33 AM

    We're all on on https://www.sigmacomputing.com/ bc we don't like hosting/managing/provisioning essential tools like this + this seems more complicated to configured.

    I would recommend a simpler setup like Metabase Docker (which I re-evaluated recently): https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/installation-and-operat...

  • by loa_observer on 5/17/24, 6:42 AM

    Seems a lit samiliar to redash, writing sql to build dashboards. or using pygwalker + streamlit for more customization. https://docs.kanaries.net/pygwalker

  • by tayloramurphy on 5/16/24, 3:04 AM

    I'll ask another of the "how is this different" questions - how is this different from https://evidence.dev/ ? Quary seems a little like dbt + Evidence from what I can see.

  • by suranyami on 5/16/24, 11:40 PM

    Tried going through the onboarding sample project from within VS-Code locally… I know, you suggest trying it in the Github Browser, but, hey, I'm perverse and it's available as an option within the extension.

    It's not at all clear from the documentation or the onboarding notes how to seed a SQLite in-memory database and the CSVs in the `seeds` directory are sometimes referred to in the sample schemas, but sometimes not. So, kinda got stuck.

    I know if I stuck with it (I got impatient), I'd figure it out myself, but it does seem to be a missing element in the docs.

    Looks fascinating, though.

    Kinda like Elixir LiveBook, but focussed on DBs.

  • by banditelol on 5/16/24, 5:58 AM

    Congrats on the launch!

    I've been evaluating evidence and observable framework for a while, and this seems like a nice addition as alternative

    But I just realized you require login when using vs code, what is it used for? And can I completely self host this?

    Thans!

  • by halfcat on 5/15/24, 6:50 PM

    We are looking at moving our Power BI stuff to Apache Superset [1]. How does this compare to Superset?

    [1] https://superset.apache.org/

  • by dantodor on 5/16/24, 3:26 AM

    Looks pretty exciting, congrats. For looking at the intro video and skimming through the documentation, I think I mostly understood what it does and how it works. What I don't understand is the endpoint: can I show the dashboards to an end-user? Does it builds a website, or its usage is limited inside VS Code?

  • by haaz on 5/15/24, 11:26 PM

    Seems similar to plotly dash, no?

  • by vim-guru on 5/16/24, 6:52 AM

    It's unfortunate that org-mode is not more wide-spread (linked to Emacs). Org-mode covers this and a million other use-cases. Don't get me wrong though, this looks really good. So, congrats to OP :)

  • by rubenfiszel on 5/15/24, 3:37 PM

    From an external look, that sounds a lot like what dbt is meant to be. Why would one choose quary over dbt?

  • by rkuodys on 5/15/24, 7:38 PM

    Does it support datasource merges like redash do? I had hard time looking for simple solution where I could easily join data from multiple sources and provide simple charts from engineering to support teams.

  • by itbk95 on 5/16/24, 3:41 AM

    Sounds interesting, I'll give it a try.

  • by tnolet on 5/15/24, 4:20 PM

    How is this different from Lightdash? https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash

  • by edmundsauto on 5/16/24, 3:08 PM

    I’m not sure how to think of this, is it an engineer first version of Metabase?

  • by b2bsaas00 on 5/15/24, 4:09 PM

    How is different from Grafana?

  • by mdaniel on 5/15/24, 3:54 PM

    Just out of curiosity, what was the reason for the MIT -> Apache 2 move? https://github.com/quarylabs/quary/commit/db7a42a58ce66df13f...

  • by cellover on 5/16/24, 9:12 AM

    Wondering if the signing in is mandatory to use it?

  • by nwatson on 5/15/24, 8:34 PM

    See also Eclipse BIRT ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project . It seems to have languished for a while but it's active once again based on updates to this Stack Overflow posting: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53362448/development-sta....

  • by cynicalsecurity on 5/15/24, 7:29 PM

    Resembles Redash.

  • by 3abiton on 5/15/24, 11:56 PM

    How does it differ from OpenDashboard?

  • by informal007 on 5/17/24, 12:51 AM

    Great product!

  • by xn on 5/15/24, 4:38 PM

    How does it quary compare to rill?

  • by vincentw21 on 5/15/24, 4:08 PM

    this looks awesome!

  • by heuermh on 5/16/24, 6:08 PM

    Curious what it might take to add AWS Athena as another back end?

  • by _hl_ on 5/15/24, 3:59 PM

    Hate to derail the conversation, but is Quary something I could easily whitelabel to embed BI into my product for my customers? (Passively) looking for solutions in that that don’t feel dumbed down.