A DuckDB-based metabase alternative
85 points
6 hours ago
| 7 comments
| github.com
| HN
written-beyond
5 hours ago
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This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation.

I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway.

I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case is only stronger in this age of LLMs.

We get so involved with our products we forget that our customers are humans too. Nobody wants another account to manage or remember. Analytics and alerts should be push based, configurable reports should get auto generated and sent to your inbox, alerts should be pushed via notifications or emails and customers should have an option to build their own dashboard with something like this.

Sane defaults make sense but location matters just as much.

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mitjam
4 hours ago
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1999-2000, the company I worked with gave a smallish number of key users full read rights to the SAP minus HR, briefly after introducing SAP to the global supply chain of that company. The key users came from all orgs using SAP, basically every department had one or two key users.

I was part of this and "saw the light". We had such a great visibility into all the processes, it was unreal. It tremendously sped-up cross-org initiatives.

Today, I guess, only agents get that privilege.

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jorin
2 hours ago
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hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards. Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere. We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.
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written-beyond
21 minutes ago
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It would be a game changer, very interesting to see this grow. How did you get your PDF generation so good?
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jorin
1 minute ago
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happy to hear that! pdfs are generated in a headless chrome in the same docker container as shaper itself using chromedp.
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matsz
4 hours ago
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> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.

A layer on top of the database to account for auth/etc. would be necessary anyways. Could be achieved to some degree with views, but I'd prefer an approach where you choose the publicly available data explicitly.

GraphQL almost delivered on that dream. Something more opinionated would've been much better, though.

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written-beyond
2 hours ago
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That's exactly what I meant. It's a specific replica instance with it's own security etc. but not necessarily a separate API you try to integrate too. APIs can stay for writes, but for reads you have the db
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piterrro
4 hours ago
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In what extent this is a metabase alternative? I'm a heavy Metabase user and there's nothing to compare really in this product.
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jorin
2 hours ago
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hi, dev building Shaper here. Both, Shaper and Metabase, can be used to build dashboards for business intelligence functionality and embedded analytics. But the use cases are different: Metabase is feature-rich and has lots of functionality for self-serve that allows non-technical users to easily build their own dashboards and drill down as they please. With Shaper you define everything as code in SQL. It's much more minimal in terms of what you can configure, but if you like the SQL-based approach it can be pretty productive to treat dashboards as code.
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piterrro
28 minutes ago
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sorry, so it ain't an alternative in any way. Its like saying a bicycle is an alternative to an airplane, both have seats...
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frafra
4 hours ago
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Metabase works great with DuckDB as well, thanks to metabase_duckdb_driver by MotherDuck.
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kavalg
1 hour ago
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This is so cool and also MPL licensed! Thanks!
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3abiton
1 hour ago
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As someone who used duckdb but not shaper, what is shaper used for? The readme is scarce on details.
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jorin
1 hour ago
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hi, dev building shaper here. shaper allows you to visualize data and build dashboards just by writing sql. the sql runs in duckdb so you can use all duckdb features. its for when you are looking for a minimal tool that allows you to just work in code. you can use shaper to build dashboards that you share internally or also for customer-facing dashboards you want to embed into another application.
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antman
28 minutes ago
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Will it expose a visual query builder as metabase?
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pdyc
4 hours ago
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interesting i am trying to build one too but rejected duckdb because of large size, i guess i will have to give in and use it at some point of time.
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andrewstuart
5 hours ago
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I wanted to love DuckDB but it was so crashy I had to give up.
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robowo
5 hours ago
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I use it daily and it never crashed. How long ago was this? I am a big fan of DuckDB. Plow through hundrets of GB of logs on a 5 year old linux laptop - no problem.
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pletnes
4 hours ago
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Same here. I have however seen a few out of memory cases in the past when given large input files.
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