Alex, that's an interesting idea.  And it's sort of the opposite approach
to what I was thinking.  My approach was "i have this database full of
stuff, can someone give me a tool that makes it easy to pull some nice
looking reports out of it?" And then down the road I might want to pull
some data out of some of our UI Analytics tools (Mixpanel, Flurry, AppSee,
etc) to mix into those reports, but it's not critical right now.

Your approach suggests pushing data to tools right off the bat.  I guess my
fear of doing it that way is that some things like sales data wouldn't be
as trustworthy coming back to us out of mixpanel as it is sitting right in
our own db.  What if mixpanel dropped a sales event? My approach was to
create a slave db that we can unleash a reporting engine on.

Through this process, if nothing else, I've learned that there is no magic
bullet and that there are way too many ways to skin this cat.

Also thanks Ryan for the multiple suggestions. In playing with BIME, one
thing that bugs me is that if you want to see multiple parts of your
database you have to define that as multiple connections. It's not just
like "connect me to this database and let me start using the tables". It's
more like "connect me to this database and make a view from these three
tables", "now connect me to this same database again and make this other
view from these two tables", etc etc.  Has your experience with it been
that that isn't an issue?  Certainly once you create those connections, it
doesn't seem too hard to make queries and dashboards.

So far there is one that I've played with that is very very easy to use and
seems to be pretty workable if you just want relatively simple reports out
of one db.  That is Viur.  I'm a little nervous about going with it because
it's sort of cheap and I don't know much about their business.  Has anyone
else ever heard of it and is it trustworthy?

Thanks,
--Jon



On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Alex Egg <[email protected]> wrote:

> It's pretty common to use mix panel or keen.io as a analytics data
> warehouse and then build custom dashboards by querying the respective
> datastore. I've used both in the past and have found that keen is much more
> flexible.
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 2:33 PM Jonathan Christensen <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm evaluating some BI tools for a client that we would connect to a PG
>> database that will be getting filled up with data by a rails app we built.
>> The app we built is essentially an ecommerce marketplace so the types of
>> analytics we need are pretty easy to guess at (sales dashboards etc).
>>
>> Does anyone have any favorite tools they've used for this?
>>
>> A few I'm looking at:
>> Looker (amazing, but feels difficult to get good at and ridiculously
>> expensive $3k/month)
>> BIME
>> Viur
>> Sisense
>>
>> The features we are looking for are ones that would make it possible for
>> us to make lots of fairly simple reports very quickly -- we don't care as
>> much about being able to make very complex reports at the moment.
>>
>> Any suggestions would be welcomed!
>> Thanks,
>> --Jon
>>
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