Re:Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?
by systemvoltage on Monday February 14, 2022 @12:19AM
(#30328636)
Tableau is a webapp version of basically SAS JMP, especially the plotting engine. So easy to create plots - literally 100x faster than matplotlib. I can drag things faster than I can type.
Tableau is really amazing actually.
PowerBI on the other hand is a straight up dashboarding tool. I've used it and it isn't quite as powerful as Tableau, but it's an easier step up from Excel. It doesn't require you reorient your mindset as much as Tableau does. But it also doesn't let you probe your data as easily as Tableau does. It's essentially a supercharged Excel dashboarding tool
Excel viz is rudimentary. It gets the job done for simple plots, but it's a hassle to join data (you have to do cell VLOOKUPs or INDEX(MATCH())) and pivot tables are a poor-man's approximation of the true power of SQL operations. It doesn't scale to large datasets but the cell-based spreadsheet paradigm (vs. a relational database paradigm) is easy to understand which has an appeal of its own. But you're ultimately limited to what fits on a spreadsheet.