> A BI tool is mostly a way to turn a query into a picture, and a picture now costs about $0.50 of tokens. It gets hard to justify a $150k licence for that part
That is an awfully simplified view of BI. In my experience, most companies struggle to define what is important, what needs to be measured, and how those measurements should be used to improve business.
While businesses try to work these details out, they try getting their analysts to in the author's words print out good pictures. But the BI tools really exist to make it easy for analysts to navigate hairy internal situations.
Producing a picture or HTML more easily is not going to solve the decisioning problem. If anything it might make it worse.
In the end, it's going to cost a lot more than 50 cents a picture.
Over a decade ago i worked at a company with a BI tool that was exactly this, minus the AI of course. it was just PHP pages backed by embedded SQL built by a non engineer. anytime someone wanted a different slice of data, the person just copied an existing page and swapped out the sql and the column names. URL query string was used for the different parameters of the SQL statement, i forget if it was open to sql injection but it was an internal tool only. even after implementing a BI tool everyone still used the PHP pages because it was faster and easier to just bookmark the specific page you want with the data you wanted.
much like low code tools, most people dont want to mess with self serve BI. AI might help with that but i think the tool in the article opens the door for people creating slightly different versions of the same thing. also, claude is awful at visualizations. every one i see looks the same, crammed full of bad charts and too much text, poor color choices, and no real value in terms of story. still, this is an interesting implementation of that concept.
I built something similar in my previous job. The part that we were never able to figure out is how to guarantee that everybody is looking at the right numbers. Even if you have a comprehensive semantic layer, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong in putting metrics on a dashboard. This is why analysts are still needed, IMHO.
Building is easy, supporting and sustaining is harder especially in light of things like all the CVEs. My startup valet.dev is a platform for skills, websites, apps, and agents that is solving for this by baking governance and sustainability into the system. All engineering teams need this, but as we see the rise of citizen developers bring productivity gains to their companies the need for collaboration, security, and sustainability builtin to the environment they work in is even more important than ever.
It would be been a more thorough analysis if they had accounted for the engineering teams’ salaries in time devoted to recreating this tool and maintaining it, rather than just tokens.
In the end, it would likely work out to more like 50% cost savings. Still good, but certainly more expensive than this article ultimately claims
You should also factor in that you have way more flexibility in the dashboards you create and everybody can build them easily, just by describing what they need.
Enterprise friends: what is snowflake and why did it have fine grained permissions for a whole company? I didn’t understand it from the snowflake website.
Snowflake is a Data Warehouse that is hosted in the cloud. The permission policies that you can define can become very complex - actually I find it's too complicated, I prefer BigQuery from GCP because of this reason.
if you want to operate this 'bucket of HTML files' over time, my startup https://valet.dev gives you the tools to host, govern, enforce policies, and secure what vibe coders create at your company.
The world of who can create software is growing (hello citizen developers!) but the challenges of operating and maintaining software is just as hard.
Pando looks nice, thanks for sharing. Is this an overlay on e.g, AWS, or is the idea that this spins up a single container and creates partitions for each of the user apps its hosting?
It’s more of an orchestrator. Destinations are controlled through runtime “adapters” which essentially tell Pando where and how to put apps. Instead of partitioning a container, it creates an isolated network and deploys the different workloads of your app as containers (database, web, api, etc.)
Since it’s modular, the goal is to be able to use AWS, GCP, kubernetes, etc. as the destination for apps, if you are already using that.(not all of them are built yet). By default it uses Docker.
Don't forget 18 months trailing Soc II, Type 2. And that the time to execute on this idea was 15 years ago, back when this was relatively difficult to build.
> We already run everything on Kubernetes, so deploying a service was mostly a matter of adding a Terraform module and a Helm chart.
Haha "we run everything on kubernetes, so deployment is a matter of using the least logical complement to it, and the lowest budget, flakiest and overbuilt alternative to plan manifests with none of the benefits of an operator"
That is an awfully simplified view of BI. In my experience, most companies struggle to define what is important, what needs to be measured, and how those measurements should be used to improve business.
While businesses try to work these details out, they try getting their analysts to in the author's words print out good pictures. But the BI tools really exist to make it easy for analysts to navigate hairy internal situations.
Producing a picture or HTML more easily is not going to solve the decisioning problem. If anything it might make it worse.
In the end, it's going to cost a lot more than 50 cents a picture.
much like low code tools, most people dont want to mess with self serve BI. AI might help with that but i think the tool in the article opens the door for people creating slightly different versions of the same thing. also, claude is awful at visualizations. every one i see looks the same, crammed full of bad charts and too much text, poor color choices, and no real value in terms of story. still, this is an interesting implementation of that concept.
It doesn't have to be intentional, it just needs to be a sufficiently complex, messy real-world data.
Now it's just a git repo.
In the end, it would likely work out to more like 50% cost savings. Still good, but certainly more expensive than this article ultimately claims
The world of who can create software is growing (hello citizen developers!) but the challenges of operating and maintaining software is just as hard.
Validating to see others trying to solve this problem too!
Since it’s modular, the goal is to be able to use AWS, GCP, kubernetes, etc. as the destination for apps, if you are already using that.(not all of them are built yet). By default it uses Docker.
“Looker is Google Cloud agentic business intelligence and embedded analytics platform.”
Something of the past according to the author.
I guess I'm not reading this...
Haha "we run everything on kubernetes, so deployment is a matter of using the least logical complement to it, and the lowest budget, flakiest and overbuilt alternative to plan manifests with none of the benefits of an operator"
Put it this way: would you rather this article didn't exist, or had less detail? Because that's the alternative in many cases.