I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me:
1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users)
2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead
3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod
4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all the data there
5. Queries were timing out against Snowflake in Blazer (never figured out the problem here, maybe the ruby gem for Snowflake was buggy?)
6. Set up Metabase instead, which worked fine, but non-technical people could never really use it.
(note: I'm a founder, shameless plug below)
This felt like a lot of work. I just wanted a place to dump all my data and easily create reports. Bonus points if non-technical people could do the same. That's what we're going for with Definite (https://www.definite.app/)
1. Built-in data warehouse - We spin up a duckdb database for you
2. 500+ connectors (e.g. Postgres, Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc.) - You don't need to buy a separate ETL, it's also built-in
3. Semantic layer - Define dimensions, measures, and joins using SQL in one place. We have pre-built models for all the sources we support (e.g. the Stripe model already has measures for MRR, churn, etc.)
4. Simple BI - Build a table with the data you want and generate visuals off that table. Works like a pivot table, if you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Definite.
I'm mike@definite.app if anyone wants help getting set up.
This is one of the better landing pages for a product I’ve seen, it’s so succinct. Nicely done. I’m going to actually evaluate your product today as a result
I know the market you are targeting with your product plug and the problems you point out are real challenges that businesses have.
But the lack of all of these features is what I absolutely love about Heroku Dataclips and products inspired by it. It does "run SQL on my DB and give me a shareable chart" more easily and effectively than any BI tool I've ever used.
It's such an incredible mini-product that made Heroku Postgres a joy to use (when I used to use Heroku), and what makes me excited about something like Blazer.
Wow wasn't aware of such connectors exist. Thought you must pay for something like that. CDATA (https://www.cdata.com/connect/connectors/) charges a fortune for connectors.
Can it handle loading data from let's say 100 pg databases (of the same schema but different tenants) and query them as if all the data was in a single database?
I think that's my main issue with tools like this.
I've been trying to retire metabase but our non technical people love it too much. everyone from marketing to finance has dashboards and alerts and reports.
Did they create the dashboards though? The problem I had is every time they wanted some small change, they needed to bother someone that knew SQL and they couldn't create one from scratch.
Was very bummed out when Heroku started charging for Hobby Tier as I had to sunset a few of my hobby apps
- Heroku was my first experience deploying a website: `git push heroku master`
- Dataclips was my first experience writing SQL
Writing code was markedly better than building dashboards in Tableau, which inspired Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - an open-source SSG for creating data websites using SQL and markdown, which I'm now working on
We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no customizability at all.
After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.
In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.
I use Blazer every day, just as a convenient way to run SQL against a read-only instance of our production database.
We also use Tableu for more sophisticated reports for non-technical users, but since blazer is just a Ruby gem, there’s almost no reason not to have it set up in a rails app.
Love the callout to Dataclips. It was easily my favorite least used feature by Heroku customers. Blazer and PgHero both got a bunch of inspiration from some of the early things we built at Heroku and its amazing having Andrew crank out so many high quality projects to make some of the tooling more broadly available.
I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project.
If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.