Top all-time · #2606
Holistics
Company blog · holistics.io/blog · on HN as huydatabusiness
Holistics is the company blog at holistics.io, writing about data and business. Since 2016, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “A Short Story About SQL's Biggest Rival”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Analytics and BI readers link Holistics posts on SQL versus QUEL, the OLAP cube, Looker and analytics setup, and a data-modelling book. Most comments cite them as sources or are product pitches.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Holistics helps data teams deliver AI-assisted self-service BI that's both powerful and reliable.
Most-linked posts?
- A Short Story About SQL's Biggest Rival8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-10-07
- Show HN: We wrote a book to help data people build scalable analytics stacks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-06-12
- OLAP != OLAP Cube4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-02-06
- The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-30
- /2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-02-04
- LLM is not enough (for self-service analytics)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-06
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-11
What Hacker News says?
Check out Holistics.io (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). While I can't say we can solve all your listed problems above, we provide enough tooling on top of your DW to help you pre-process (clean, aggregate) them. https://www.holistics.io/data-preparation/ And on the part about firehose data, you might already know this, but Kafka and their line of work should be aligned with what you're after.
Comment linking /data-preparation/
on “Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?”Submitted A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival as a story · 256 points
HN discussionIf you want something that's affordable, yet can serve the full need of what open-source tools can't, do check us out - https://www.holistics.io We've worked with both small, medium to big tech unicorns. I built the product during my role as data engineer at previous tech startup's employer (we got acquired), so we understood well what are the features desired by SME/startup.
Comment linking /
on “Google Data Studio”Submitted The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020) as a story · 211 points
HN discussionAs I read through your list, I feel like our product ( https://holistics.io ) can serve you well on these fronts - We are both ETL + BI, we help you get data into your DW easily (CSV Upload, DB Sync, etc) - Support for dashboard-wide filters, model joins, pivots For complex time comparison (last week, QTD, YTD) we have metrics spreadsheets: https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/
Comment linking /
on “Google Data Studio”Submitted The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube as a story · 194 points
HN discussionHere in hacker news it was posted this article about the story of SQL biggest rival, QUEL, which is pretty related: https://www.holistics.io/blog/quel-vs-sql/ ? It is not that we didn't try to replace it, but just as other comments have said, SQL was good enough, and already has the biggest mind share.
Comment linking /blog/quel-vs-sql/
on “Against SQL”Submitted The Rise of SQL-Based Data Modeling as a story · 192 points
HN discussionI really like Redash, it’s one of the early tools that introduce this concept of turn SQL into chart to developers, and also teach developers to learn and write better SQL, altogether without any cost. I evaluated Redash during my past company back in 2013 (we were also using Tableau), but due to some Redash’s lack of features (no support for filters, lack of permission control, sporadic performance), we went and bu…
Comment linking /
on “Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data”Submitted Show HN: Visualize Your Rails App to ER Diagram Automatically as a story · 104 points
HN discussionFor those who're interested in learning more about the history and evolution of data infrastructure/BI - basically why and how it has come to this stage - check out this short guidebook [1] that my colleagues and I put together a few months back. It goes into details how much relevance the practices of the past (OLAP, Kimball's modeling) has with the current changes in by the cloud era (MPP, cheap storage/compute, e…
Comment linking /books/setup-analytics/
on “Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure”Submitted What Is an OLAP Cube? An Exhaustive Explainer as a story · 86 points
HN discussionHi! You may like to check out what our team has built at www.holistics.io. The pricing metrics of our embedded dashboards cater for you to scale to unlimited viewers, and you don't need to recreate a duplicate copy of your user accounts into our system for it to work. Check out the video below to find out more! https://www.holistics.io/guides/embed-analytics/
Comment linking /guides/embed-analytics/
on “Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?”Submitted Show HN: We wrote a book to help data people build scalable analytics stacks as a story · 33 points
HN discussionFor anyone who is not familiar with Looker, I wrote a write-up and review about it here https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/ . Here are the key points: - Its use of LookML provides a steep learning curve, yet provides a maintainable and reusable data modeling - Looker's drill-down ability is decently powerful and easy to use once you are familiar with LookML. - Looker does not have its own stor…
Comment linking /blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/
on “Google to Acquire Looker”Submitted Show HN: Analytics Setup Guidebook- Explaining the Confusing Analytics Landscape as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI had a similar issue and switched to https://holistics.io . Working great so far.
Comment linking /
on “Migrating from Google Analytics”Submitted Why Google Analytics Sucks, and What You Can Do About It as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI think it's missing the resources to one of the hardest sections: Data modelling, like Kimball and Data Vault. That, and maybe a section to modern data infrastructure. I'd put a link to [1] and [2] for a quick overview and probably [3] for more detail. [1] https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/ [2] https://a16z.com/2020/10/15/the-emerging-architectures-for-m... [3] https://awesomedataengineering.com/
Comment linking /books/setup-analytics/
on “How to Become a Data Engineer in 2021”Submitted Judge Your Company: How to Make Better Data Career Decisions as a story · 6 points
HN discussionBTW, their followup piece at https://www.holistics.io/blog/olap-is-not-olap-cube/ is a nicer drill down into some of these issues. Also a good read.
Comment linking /blog/olap-is-not-olap-cube/
on “The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020)”Submitted A Short Story About SQL's Biggest Rival as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI work for a BI startup (competitor to Domo), so as part of my work, we did our own analysis of Domo product, and also chanced across prospects/customers that are current/ex-Domo users. Domo is very "business users friendly", they do this by: - Very pretty (and drag-and-drop capable) visualization. Not as compared to Tableau though, but still. - Native mobile apps - Their Domo cache + datasets concept, that makes it…
Comment linking /
on “Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs”Submitted The Rise of SQL-Based Data Modeling as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWhile Quicksight is game-changing in their pricing and trying to disrupt the usually-overpriced BI market (the same thing it did very successfully with Amazon Redshift and data-warehouse market), as the other comment pointed out their product is still not up-to-par with existing ones. If you're looking for affordable BI platform for startup, check out Holistics [0] (note: I'm cofounder), we are very tech startup-fri…
Comment linking /
on “Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone”Submitted A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTo add on to your list: https://www.holistics.io (I work here).
Comment linking /
on “PopSQL – Modern, collaborative SQL editor for your team”Submitted OLAP != OLAP Cube as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think yes, all these products -> https://segment.com , https://rudderstack.com , https://snowplowanalytics.com , https://fivetran.com , https://stitchdata.com , https://www.alooma.com , https://singer.io , https://www.holistics.io , can work as a pipeline, but some have more features than others. This is a bit simplifying answer.
Comment linking /
on “Amazon AppFlow”Submitted How to read The Data Warehouse Toolkit in 2020 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
