Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative

[cateye]

Would be useful to have some information how this compares with https://www.metabase.com/ or https://meltano.com/

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Metabase can't be beaten in terms of looks and functionality but I do like this.

[tdhz77]

I’m still using informixDB so the bring your own jbdc connector maybe what I was looking for in Poli.

[vbsteven]

Nice project, congrats on shipping.

I’ve taken a quick glance and looked at the code. It’s a Java/Spring Boot project which usually gets a lot of flak around here for “too much magic”.

This project is written in a very clean style and seems to use a minimum of Spring. Mainly rest controllers, configuration and and dependency injection. No hibernate/orm or AOP stuff.

[viraptor]

> No ETLs

This seems to be listed as a feature, which I find confusing. Not everything lives in SQL databases. Some things you extract for example from external APIs.

Is this basically "this is out of scope for the project", or it's a feature because we've got <alternative>?

[bollockitis]

It does say in the description that this was built for “SQL lovers.”

[stewbrew]

It's a pity they use pie charts to show off their software. At least the don't show them in 3D. (And just to make it clear: there is no use case where pie charts are the best solution. At best they are an acceptable solution.)

[listenallyall]

Even worse is the "Sales Ranking" in the first example, clearly the size or area of the entries is not proportional to the differences in sales, instead it is highly misleading to display the data as a perfect triangle. The TreeMap-esque "Qty by Product" is also useless -- is Cup larger or smaller than Glass? Stacked bars for "Location by Year" is another obfuscated mechanism for delivering "information" -- which was the best year for Warehouse?

[solidasparagus]

What's wrong with pie charts? What would you suggest using when you want to see a percentage breakdown?

[I_am_tiberius]

Hackernews is so strange. The post some weeks ago with the title "Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use SQL reporting application built for SQL lovers" didn't get traction at all.

[yuegui]

Author here. Thanks everyone for using Poli. I am happy to answer any questions!

[maxwin]

Most of our teams are viewing BI from their phones. Is there plan to develop a mobile app or mobile friendly version

[chime]

What was your inspiration / motivation behind this project? Are you the sole dev or is there a team behind you?

[roywiggins]

This looks nice. We have been using http://redash.io for basic reporting dashboards, but this looks promising.

[mmsimanga]

Another BI tool worth checking out is one called A Reporting Tool(ART)[0]. ART has been around for well over 10 years. Not the classiest looking piece of software but it is packed with features BI people will appreciate. For starters it integrates with JasperReports. This means you can design reports for printing using Jasper designer. It integrates quite a few Java libraries allowing you to create reports using Excel and PowerPoint. LDAP integration is built in and it has a nifty scheduler allowing you to publish reports to FTP locations. It really is a nifty tool. Like I said it doesn't compete with the modern tools in terms of looks but it packs a whole lot of features. You configure your own JDBC driver and there is a JDBC driver for most databases and data stores.

[0]http://art.sourceforge.net

[donpdonp]

BI = Business Intelligence

[Ygg2]

BI = Writing reports

[cabaalis]

Wow, thanks! I have built many visualizations and dashboards using javascript and d3, and even just a couple of weeks ago was considering creating my own side-project to do just what this software does. I guess I'll be looking for a new project..

[chime]

This looks fantastic! Since it runs as a self-hosted jar, is there any way to change the UI? Put it in a frame, style with CSS, call some JS for automation or report selection with parameters?

[yuegui]

The UI is not configurable at this moment. You can embed the full screen view in an <iframe> and then adjust URL parameters to select which report to load.

[ccffph]

This looks great! I've been searching for something similar for a side project and I think I'll give Poli a try. Thank you.

[apahwa]

why not use Superset?

[massaman_yams]

Superset's very powerful, but other options can be easier for common use cases.

[exabrial]

ever try to setup superset?

[rb808]

yeah I was hoping for more feedback on Superset and with Druid as well. They look great but there's very little buzz about them.

[gitgud]

Does anyone know of a NoSQL alternative? Hopefull something compatible with MongoDB or Firestore...

[suyash]

Nice, believe you're using JavaFx for UI correct, very cool!

[pvorb]

No, the UI uses React. I can't see where JavaFX is involved.

[edgarvaldes]

Quite impressive, bookmarked for later use.

What is the story behind Poli?

[yuegui]

Thanks. The project is built mainly to solve my own problem that I often receive requests from the business side that they wanna access the data in the production system (We use different RDMS and Elasticsearch) so they can generate some simple charts in Excel and display to the customers. The request is not difficult but we just don't have a system for that. Since then, I have been trying different BI solutions like Power BI, Kibana and some other open source tools. They are either too complicated to setup/use or the license/fee is not friendly enough to me. That's why I build Poli. I want it to be more focusing on easy to use, having an open license and the developer can use SQL to build reports easily for the end users or embed the reports in their systems.