How are you using Redash?

[robi]

Anyone using it?
How so?
Have you successfully pointed it at the local Cloudron DBs?

[rmdes]

@robi I tried to point it to cloudron db's but never managed to make this work, if you manage to do this I'm interested to learn !

[martinkbs]

You just have to use the command in the server terminal to identify the host IP.

docker inspect mysql | grep IPAddress

With this and with the credentials of the application database, you can connect Redash.

[jimcavoli]

@robi Yeah, I set it up as you suggested, but confusion/difficulty around permissions and the requirement of SQL to build queries brought be back to Metabase. I've played with Apache Superset before, the other of the "big 3" in this space (if we keep Grafana separate; imo not in the same category) though I don't remember a ton about it by comparison. Either way, pointing it at the databases was the easy part.

[robi]

@jimcavoli so you're saying Metabase is better to point at the local DB and get some automatic insights than with Redash where you have to build out the queries for the graphs?

[marcusquinn]

Most useful thing for me with any of these apps is building pivot-tables, which sadly is an enterprise feature in Metabase. Not played with Redash yet but if anyone knows if it does pivot-tables, that would be a huge win for creating self-service reporting tools.

[jimcavoli]

@robi Yeah, if it's automatic or nearly automatic "here's some interesting things" you want, it's worth getting the data model set up with some added detail in the Metabase Admin, which is easy enough (it does a pretty good job of inferring common conventions), and then browsing through the data and doing different visualizations is dead easy, plus it'll try to do some automatic "X-Rays" as it calls the auto-generated dashboards. Here's an example of a table that I haven't customized the data model on at all, but it did a good job with, as an example:

Edit: Ugh, no GIFs allowed. Here's a sequence of static shots:

I'd suggest playing with both - there's necessarily going to be a fair bit of preference at play here.

[nebulon]

@jimcavoli fixed the gif uploading

[jimcavoli]

@nebulon You rock

[robi]

@marcusquinn https://redash.io/help/user-guide/visualizations/pivot-table-visualizations

Accessible from the in app help under Visualizations