Hot take as a datamonkey who’s done a lot of work in this vein professionally:
General-purpose self-serve is hostile to non-technical end users. Most do not have the mental model of SQL to guide their usage of the tool, so giving them an “open-ended” option to run their own vizes ends up really being a fence-toss of some technobabble garbage that isn’t useful to them at all.
“Slice n’ Dice”-style filtering added to an existing set of reports, however, is a completely viable middle ground. Practically speaking, this means writing the basic dashboard query, then hooking a bunch of query parameters up to some front-end UI widgets to let end users pick the date range, level-of-detail, filter which trendlines or categories of data are shown, etc. Just use good taste to avoid going overboard - don’t try to make every last detail configurable.
General-purpose self-serve is hostile to non-technical end users. Most do not have the mental model of SQL to guide their usage of the tool, so giving them an “open-ended” option to run their own vizes ends up really being a fence-toss of some technobabble garbage that isn’t useful to them at all.
“Slice n’ Dice”-style filtering added to an existing set of reports, however, is a completely viable middle ground. Practically speaking, this means writing the basic dashboard query, then hooking a bunch of query parameters up to some front-end UI widgets to let end users pick the date range, level-of-detail, filter which trendlines or categories of data are shown, etc. Just use good taste to avoid going overboard - don’t try to make every last detail configurable.