Last year Chartio came up with the idea of Visual SQL Editor which is great. It is great for people who are creating the charts. When I stared on the journey of SQL Frames last year, while I liked what Chartio has done, I felt something was missing. Especially if you look at the licensing of most BI products, which say 5 creators and unlimited viewers or something along those lines, what's missing becomes a bit more obvious. It is that the Visual SQL Editor only caters to those 5 creators (and may be a few more) but not the plenty of end users consuming those charts and dashboards.

So, what can be done to all those users? This has been a quest for SQL Frames and I think the answer may be what I call as DataFrame Explorer™.

One of the best things about JAMSTACK is that it is possible to provide searching the entire site with the search processing done entirely on the client. This is a big deal as there is no need for expensive servers to drive the search and more importantly it provides milliseconds latency for the users so they love to stay on the website for longer and explore.

Text search is an important part of data analysis and being able to do it entirely on the client is possible by projects like lunr. SQL Frames has integrated text search (thank you lunr). Use cases with examples are discussed below.

Most data analysis workflows involve a) exploring data with ad-hoc reports b) identifying key metrics and trends c) creating dashboards consolidating important metrics and repeating the process.

Dashboards offer rich interactivity that single reports cannot and benefit the end users of the dashboards. But don't ad-hoc reports created during the data exploration stage also need dashboards for the same level of interaction? The problem with most analytics tools is that building dashboard is a ceremonial action that involves creating a new dashboard entity, giving it a name, determining the layout and then adding reports one by one and reordering with drag-n-drop all making it a lengthy process. Is there some way to make it extremely easy to create dashboards for ad-hoc reports as well with out all that extra baggage? The answer is yes, and I call it ad-hoc dashboards that are perfect in a low-code environment.

These days most enterprise applications are delivered on the cloud as SAAS applications. There are also many low-code application development platforms that make it easy to create custom workflows and user experiences. However, even the big players in this space such as Salesforce, seldom provide powerful analytics. That is, we are not talking about simple reports but more advanced reports that actually can provide deeper insights. Wondering why? I will explain it with a few examples.

It is common to pre-aggregate data to improve the performance of generating the reports. While pre-aggregation is in general a good technique, grouping of data by various dimensions and their permutations and time dimension and its various buckets including sliding windows can lead to explosion of pre-aggregated data. Hence the requirements should be carefully evaluated and in some cases it may be better solved using a technique called double aggregation, where data is pre-aggregated to the lowest level first and is then aggregated further as needed on-demand.