"Google Data Studio (beta) turns your data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Start telling great stories with your data and make better business decisions.
Create up to five free custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing with Data Studio."
My guess is that they are trying to make a data analytics platform for data in general, but the system integrates easily with their other data driven products.
The Data Studio appears to be explicitly a dashboard service, but for any kind of data (which puts it in competition with services like Tableau). There is some overlap with Google Analytics and its native dashboards, but that's not a bad thing.
...in the cloud, hence it aims more at being a glue for the web. Merge datasources from anywhere, create joint reports, an incentive for everyone to open-up their data and make it accessible to Google. Sounds like a smart idea to place Google in the middle of the web.
Also worth checking out is http://redash.io for this kind of stuff - fairly new but developing quickly and very easy to hack on/add stuff. Good docs, easy to deploy and has some nice auto-update reports bits. We use that quite heavily. Its open source/free to use but also comes with paid cloudy plans.
Agreed. PowerBI has so much more functionality - and more adding every month. And with the ability to use R to make charts, it has a lot more customizability.
The Google Analytics team built a dashboard tool, as part of their "Google Analytics 360" release. Other teams, including Cloud, then worked with them to make it available for other data sources, including Google BigQuery and MySQL.
This is a fully-fledged basic business intelligence tool, which can chart data from Google Analytics, Google Sheets and MySQL an series of other sources. It is a perfect free alternative to QlikView/Tableau for some simple data projects.
Probably no reason other than that it takes time and resources to go through all the steps necessary to launch in a region (e.g. localization, legal etc), and it's more effective to get feedback on a beta product early in one region than to delay for many.
Exactly. Because we in the EU do not want our customer data (be it personal identifiable information or not) to be transferred to the US without consent of our customers. And rightly so.
I am abbreviating massively here, but since the "Safe Harbor" things are actually a little bit more rough around data transfers.
Non the less Data Studio is available in Germany, as I have already used it. I might be limited on the data sources though.
>Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.
I'm sure this is awesome. However if I were a f500 company using this (or in competition with one), I would be careful with what data I put into Google's cloud.
Generally, the products Google offers for free involve them using the data you put into it to tailor their products and services to you. Not having examined the EULA, I don't know if this product is similar, but in general, that is the reason my legal department does not react nicely when projects try to bring google products into our ecosystem.
Not the PP, but though I have never come across anything substantive, there have been persistent rumors that Google M&A (and other) folks trawl through GMail to gain competitive advantages and negotiating leverage, particularly vs. startups.
OTOH, the rumors are most often of the "my 2nd cousin's mother-in-law's half-brother's secretary's boyfriend's ex-husband" variety, ie. not even anonymous 1st hand claims.
Anecdotally, these rumors seem to most often be spread by Enterprise SaaS salespeople.
"Which startups are good acquisition targets?" is very much a data-mining problem, though I would expect that noticing a startup experiencing "hockey stick" growth based on the growth of their Google Cloud Platform bill (or perhaps the # of users logging in with Google credentials, etc.) is much more likely than any Google employees (no matter how highly placed) trawling through Gmail looking for proprietary information.
Because Google's production systems aren't internally open like that, other teams can't just go grepping through production data systems (which is encrypted at rest anyway). Yes, there are obviously systems which do index data for search, spam prevention, etc, but those are guarded too, and the surface area of access is greatly reduced.
You can't just decide "Hey, I've got an idea for a cool 20% project, I'm going to try crawling all mail and looking for stock market tips". There is defense in depth, in terms of technical walls, as well as people walls, that makes something like that very unlikely. With tens of thousands of employees, it would be easy to get 1 rogue employee who could do serious damage with that kind of access.
Google takes data security and privacy very very seriously, and a breach of that magnitude would threaten hundreds of billions in valuation for a rather crazy risky idea for an M&A department?
BTW, Google Ventures has a better way to do this which relies on public data, Project Sandhill.
By looking at data from Crunchbase, Angelist, etc you can get a deeper graph of the interrelationships in Silicon Valley. If I was looking at who to invest in, or M&A, I'd be looking at data like that, as well as talking with investors and people they've worked with.
You are almost certainly right, but it is worth noting the considerable amount of FUD spread by interested parties that feeds into these sort of rumors.
OTOH, "The NSA has a backdoor into Google" used to be something only paranoids believed too...
We use this for a client with Google adwords data. User can go to a url and see data and plots we selected for him. Decent tool, easy to use but a bit slow when I used it last month.
Feels old seeing this on every single thread about a Google product. This isn't something you need to retool your company around and end up screwed if it's canceled. It's a nice analytics dashboard that either provides value for you for however long you decide to use it, or if it has no value to you then you just won't use it.
It's less about their reputation and has just become a meme nowadays, particularly among techies who were the few adopters of things like Wave. I don't think Google misses on and shuts down a larger percentage of things than any other company, just seems like with everything they have going on, they try more things and inherently fail on more things. It obviously sucks for the users of those things, but I'd rather the time is spent innovating and trying many different things than spending valuable engineering time supporting projects that aren't going anywhere.
When you fail frequently at things, this fail often strategy, you aren't valuing your customers. Saying they have an excuse for failing often doesn't change the effect it has on users. Which is that they can not place their trust in your products or your company, because you've made it clear you're willing to shut them down at any time.
I definitely agree that it sucks when you're one of the consumers affected. But I would argue that this fail often strategy lets you quickly figure out what works and what doesn't for most consumers, and let's you prioritize accordingly and maximize net consumer value created. Obviously that comes with negatives, but I believe they are outweighed by the positives.
Push come to shove, I'd side with Thiel. That is many of Google's fails are staged. They need excuses / distractions from their core monopoly-esque products.
> but I'd rather the time is spent innovating and trying many different things than spending valuable engineering time supporting projects that aren't going anywhere
Instead, they have some of their engineers do things like remove the ability to do custom grouping on youtube subscriptions. It often seems like they are seeing how badly they can treat their users and still remain the leader.
I've never even heard of that, and I would consider myself a heavy youtube user.
But i'm just one person, so that doesn't mean much, but do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?
What about the fact that every feature has a cost, and by removing it they remove that cost. How did that custom grouping work on mobile? on TV's? on youtube gaming? If it's not supported everywhere, it feels buggy and incomplete, which is bad not only for their image, but also for usability. What was it's discoverability? How important of a feature was it really to you?
It's easy to use these things as examples of "something they took away", but i'm confident that if I were put in their exact same situation, I would most likely make the same choice, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.
Maybe you are a recent user like myself as the functionality was removed relatively recently, people have come up with various crap workarounds.
> do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?
Of course not, just curious why they are removing useful functionality. Your questions are valid, but considering Google's history of "improving" their products, I don't feel compelled to believe there is a good reason for it.
That might be true. But it's the expectation that they don't have to be so quick to do it, especially when they are so good at mucking up launch and growth. The best example being Wave. Meanwhile Slack, an inferior effort, is laughing.
Google has a reputation for being a booty call. Fun and crazy, which is great in college. But if you're looking for a LTR a newish Google product probably is marry + kids material.
I'd say this was true a while back because of database lock-in, but most new BI tools have a variety of connectors. I'm working with a non profit right now to migrate dashboards off of Salesforce, for example.
Yes. But why even bother if the company offering the product is known to abandon its customers? Why not find and trust a trustable brand? Unless there's something exceptional about this product. First time shame on you. Second, third and fourth time... shame on me.
Every company sunsets old products. Do you feel the same when Windows discontinued XP? When apple dropped support for safari on windows? When your favorite startup tool just closed up shop one day without much of any notice?
At least when google sunsets a tool, they almost always give a year+ of notice, the often provide alternatives, the always allow full data export, and they have been known to extend support for a product if there is a lot of pushback.
I find it odd that valid criticism such as the parent is getting downvoted for no apparent reason. HN used to be about providing a balanced view on subjects, not about censoring negative opinions.
If it gets more people using bigquery and the rest of their platform they'll keep it around. Plus, Amazon have a similar product, so this is in a completely different league to Reader or whatever.
That's not that interesting to most of us. That's a huge edge case that I've seen used as fodder in every MySQL vs Postgres argument on HN since it's come up since that blog article was published.
That shows MySQL can be used as a base for building your own key-value store on. It doesn't say anything about it being reasonable (or even good) relational database.
I'd argue that the majority of people are supporting legacy rather than building something new, or something that has been built in the past couple years.
Actually longer than that. It effectively is what Ingres was a long time ago before Oracle basically killed them off. I believe Ingres was a product of some IBM people? Way way ahead of its time.
As someone who has used MySQL with absolutely no problems on over 100 projects over the past 20 years, I really don't get the hate I see for it on HN and other places. I've never used Postgres so cannot comment on that, but unless someone can show me that MySQL kills kittens with every query and Postgres moves us one step closer to a cure for cancer with every SELECT, then I'm just going to carry on over here in my corner...
Why no. If you do not get why PostgreSQL is so much better than MySQL after reading so many people telling you otherwise, I guess I will not spend time on this task. There are some people prefering PHP over Python or Golang, too.
Just a hint: if you did not try PostgreSQL, just maybe give it a try?
And yes, MySQL kills kittens (i.e. potentially silently truncates data) at every UPDATE it receives.
Well, I'll give you credit for going that little bit further than the post I was responding to. At least you gave a hint as to ONE issue that MySQL can have (which, by the way, I have never come across in the millions or so UPDATES that my projects have done over the years). A link to a discussion about the problem would have been handy, but, oh well.
And I actually did try PostgreSQL once or twice many years ago. If I remember correctly, it was for a project that required full text search capability, and I had no end of trouble trying to configure and optimise PostgreSQL to do it back then, and simply reverted back to MySQL which worked out of the box. Or possibly I even went to SQLite with FTS3 back then to get it to work. I, like most developers would rather be creative on my code rather than fight my tools.
I have several websites with a reasonable number of users running on both MySQL and Postgres. On the balance I think I prefer MySQL - I find the replication in MySQL quite a lot simpler and the issues are not that big of a deal, and well known. Although I will say that both databases are fixing their faults as time goes on. For example Postgres is getting easier to configure replication and as of MySQL 5.7 the silent truncate default STRICT_TRANS_TABLES/STRICT_ALL_TABLES is fixed (although generally implementations I've used set SQL_MODE='STRICT_ALL_TABLES' by default, so it hasn't been an issue).
Google is a MySQL shop. It's what their RDS-like cloud offering runs, and it is (or at least, was) the supported RDBMS for building apps internally. (Sadly)
I have tried it ~1 month ago and was quite a bit underwhelmed - direct connectivity with Google products is nice, but the data manipulation capabilities themselves lag behind Tableau a big deal (especially when it comes to clicking around in charts and tables to slice your dataset, which is admittedly something in which Tableau excels).
I do believe it is a valuable addition to the GA enterprise tier (especially for customers savvy enough to use BigQuery too), but at the moment I don't quite see it as a serious competitor to other off-the-shelf BI tools - would be very happy to be proved wrong in a few months, though.
I think tools like this are going to enable more government accountability. Facilitating visualization and sharing of what otherwise would be a bunch of numbers is key.
In Mexico there is only one electric utility company. The price per kWh is supposed to be a function of the median monthly temperature. However, many cities are misclassified on purpose. A map showing which cities are misclassified would be really easy to do and share if it supported maps.
I think what will make chart.io obsolete more that this announcement is their (chart.io's) reluctance to put any sort of pricing plans or free tier capabilities (or even if they actually have a free tier) anywhere on their site. I get that this is the enterprise-y thing to do, but it would be a massive turn off for the sort of audience who would be evaluating it against DataStudio or PowerBI etc.
Data Studio is much more focused on creating data analytics dashboards. It looks like a very visual centric tool. Thanks for the link to fusion though. I haven't heard of it. Kinda out of the googlsphere.
I wonder if this will be able to extend the Google cloud console / analytics.
And it's nit-picky but some of the dashboards aren't responsive in chrome, which I would normally let go but if you're gonna force us into the cult of material design you might as well get that right.
We're using this a lot at Khan Academy already. Nothing that other products can't do, but the ease of use, familiar interface, and google account integration have made use of it spread through the company very quickly
Tried using it yesterday, but says it's not available in my country (South Africa). I'm tired of silly restrictions like this, it immediately turned me off Data Studio.
I have a Tableau licence at work, which we feel are expensive and restrictive in terms of transferring licenses around when no longer needed.
Seems like a no disappointment option these days is to just invest in the d3 ecosystem as much as possible.
It could be as simple as them testing the waters or as complex as data storage and analysis having different requirements per country. It is annoying but may be the best they can do.
I could access it from US VPN, so I don't know what the real trouble is.
I can't think of anything in my country that would prevent Google from offering this service. From a billing perspective, Google already makes some money from me, and many companies, so I can't imagine that being a stumbling block.
Google could have spread the Beta using an invitation-only scheme (Remember Gmail? That's how they controlled the load). Exclusive invitations are more inclusive than a US-centric approach. Customers get fed-up with US-centric approaches, which give us:
- Different content on Netflix (Many movies in US, less than 1/4 in Poland),
- Different treatment as civilians (See: NSA spying, Predators)
- Movies coming 6 months later in Europe.
I get it that US customers have more money, but if companies could use a specific criteria like "high-return customers" rather than a prejudice like "Only Silicon Valley customers will understand", that would be nice.
But if we assume the issue is a legal one and they need lawyers specializing in each country's laws to vet it for every country they release it in releasing a preview per-country makes sense.
This is almost my favorite tool, barring a couple problems. Its very easy to use, and makes very readable, pretty reports/dashboards. Sharing via a URL is nice, but I really like just exporting as a PDF and emailing them. Here is an example report that took <10 minutes to make [1]. The big problems though:
1. Beta version. You can't use this in production, send reports to clients, etc. when this tool is in beta. A client gets this report and expects all future reports to be this pretty, but Google might just kill it off or it could break.
2. Limited to 5 reports. The majority of agencies/brands can't afford the $100k+ a year for premium G suite. 5 reports per account kind of sucks, and I've had to use old google accounts to get past that limit.
3. Design. Most people simple aren't good at design, so you need a designer to create a good number of templates. Users cannot stray away from templates unless they know what they are doing. While its easy to use, its easy to make things look bad too.
4. You can pull from a Google Sheets, but updating that sheets doesn't play nicely with data studio.
Side ux notes.. changing pages resets the date range which is annoying. Choosing custom colors for some charts doesn't always work.
It isn't. It's part of the Analytics 360 Suite. Other products in the suite being: Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Google Surveys, Audience Center, Google Attribution and Google Tag Manager. It's a very similar set of products to the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
How does updating sheets used as data source not play nicely with dat studio? I would expect the report to update when the sheet changes, at least when the report is reloaded. Is this what is happening?
Right now, because of caching the update can take up to 12h. But you can manually update the data source to bring the latests data from the spreadsheet.
Thanks for the heads-up. That would indeed cause an interesting confusion if not known to the users. We could probably live with it for some use cases, a more direct update would be better though.
With web tech you can make interactive graphics and animations, sure you can hover over a diagram and see the numbers, but they are only scratching the surface of what is possible.
Anybody have decent test data connections that can be used to play with this? Unfortunately my personal Google account is sparse and doesn't provide much meat on the bone.
A nicer alternative for non-US folks, or even those in the US, would be DataHero (https://datahero.com/). Less feature rich than Tableau, but also extremely easy to use with practical graphs and data mashups out of the box.
I have no connection to the app, other than I've tried dozens like it, including Google's Data Studio.
I always see this as a bullet point discounting other more advanced tools. How many chart types exactly do you need? As far as I can tell, most analyses that anyone needs to do on tabular data (so ignoring graph like analytics) requires maybe 6 different chart types (bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, heatmaps). Those cover basically every possible combination of numeric and categorical data axes (including color and size of elements).
Why is this still a thing any more? Even more this is a product of a single company so no legacy licensing scheme (like for movies for instance) can be blamed :(
Belay that, I just tried to create a report and yes, it says the same to me. No clue if it's a matter of data sovereignty, privacy, legal, technical, or billing, and the usual non-information from Google.
I'm in Portugal too and it doesn't work, only let's you play around with the pre-existing reports. Edit: commented before seeing your second reply, my bad.
190 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] thread"Google Data Studio (beta) turns your data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable. Start telling great stories with your data and make better business decisions.
Create up to five free custom reports with unlimited editing and sharing with Data Studio."
(From https://www.google.com/analytics/data-studio/)
This also isn't anything new, it was released a few months ago: https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/05/announcing-data-stu...
Why wouldn't this just be integrated into their existing platform?
(Tableau may have a cloud version too, I'm actually not sure)
Second is that it's hosted. That makes it a non-starter for enterprise reporting.
So the easy thing is to limit it to the US.
I am abbreviating massively here, but since the "Safe Harbor" things are actually a little bit more rough around data transfers.
Non the less Data Studio is available in Germany, as I have already used it. I might be limited on the data sources though.
Interesting point: what if you work for someone in the US and want to collaborate on a report?
Or you work in the US but need to access / change a report while visiting a client in a country where it's not enabled...
Pretty lame.
>Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.
OTOH, the rumors are most often of the "my 2nd cousin's mother-in-law's half-brother's secretary's boyfriend's ex-husband" variety, ie. not even anonymous 1st hand claims.
Anecdotally, these rumors seem to most often be spread by Enterprise SaaS salespeople.
You can't just decide "Hey, I've got an idea for a cool 20% project, I'm going to try crawling all mail and looking for stock market tips". There is defense in depth, in terms of technical walls, as well as people walls, that makes something like that very unlikely. With tens of thousands of employees, it would be easy to get 1 rogue employee who could do serious damage with that kind of access.
Google takes data security and privacy very very seriously, and a breach of that magnitude would threaten hundreds of billions in valuation for a rather crazy risky idea for an M&A department?
By looking at data from Crunchbase, Angelist, etc you can get a deeper graph of the interrelationships in Silicon Valley. If I was looking at who to invest in, or M&A, I'd be looking at data like that, as well as talking with investors and people they've worked with.
OTOH, "The NSA has a backdoor into Google" used to be something only paranoids believed too...
Just played around datastudio, customization seems easier.
Instead, they have some of their engineers do things like remove the ability to do custom grouping on youtube subscriptions. It often seems like they are seeing how badly they can treat their users and still remain the leader.
But i'm just one person, so that doesn't mean much, but do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?
What about the fact that every feature has a cost, and by removing it they remove that cost. How did that custom grouping work on mobile? on TV's? on youtube gaming? If it's not supported everywhere, it feels buggy and incomplete, which is bad not only for their image, but also for usability. What was it's discoverability? How important of a feature was it really to you?
It's easy to use these things as examples of "something they took away", but i'm confident that if I were put in their exact same situation, I would most likely make the same choice, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.
> do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?
Of course not, just curious why they are removing useful functionality. Your questions are valid, but considering Google's history of "improving" their products, I don't feel compelled to believe there is a good reason for it.
Google has a reputation for being a booty call. Fun and crazy, which is great in college. But if you're looking for a LTR a newish Google product probably is marry + kids material.
At least when google sunsets a tool, they almost always give a year+ of notice, the often provide alternatives, the always allow full data export, and they have been known to extend support for a product if there is a lot of pushback.
I notice that Google has consistently built support for MySQL in all its products...but never postgres.
I don't understand why - is there a massive amount of engineering involved ?
Why no. If you do not get why PostgreSQL is so much better than MySQL after reading so many people telling you otherwise, I guess I will not spend time on this task. There are some people prefering PHP over Python or Golang, too.
Just a hint: if you did not try PostgreSQL, just maybe give it a try?
And yes, MySQL kills kittens (i.e. potentially silently truncates data) at every UPDATE it receives.
Then why do you comment at all? Your post brings nothing to the discussion but appeals to popularity and shaming gp.
And I actually did try PostgreSQL once or twice many years ago. If I remember correctly, it was for a project that required full text search capability, and I had no end of trouble trying to configure and optimise PostgreSQL to do it back then, and simply reverted back to MySQL which worked out of the box. Or possibly I even went to SQLite with FTS3 back then to get it to work. I, like most developers would rather be creative on my code rather than fight my tools.
I do believe it is a valuable addition to the GA enterprise tier (especially for customers savvy enough to use BigQuery too), but at the moment I don't quite see it as a serious competitor to other off-the-shelf BI tools - would be very happy to be proved wrong in a few months, though.
In Mexico there is only one electric utility company. The price per kWh is supposed to be a function of the median monthly temperature. However, many cities are misclassified on purpose. A map showing which cities are misclassified would be really easy to do and share if it supported maps.
Shoot me an email to pablo (at) rocketjourney.com to discuss it further!
By comparison. Last I talked to Looker (self hosted). They asked for $65k/year.
https://fusiontables.google.com/
And it's nit-picky but some of the dashboards aren't responsive in chrome, which I would normally let go but if you're gonna force us into the cult of material design you might as well get that right.
I have a Tableau licence at work, which we feel are expensive and restrictive in terms of transferring licenses around when no longer needed.
Seems like a no disappointment option these days is to just invest in the d3 ecosystem as much as possible.
They need to spend time and money on lawyers which specialize in that country's laws to look over everything and make sure.
And that takes time and money, and you don't want to spend either of those when testing the waters on a new product.
- Different content on Netflix (Many movies in US, less than 1/4 in Poland),
- Different treatment as civilians (See: NSA spying, Predators)
- Movies coming 6 months later in Europe.
I get it that US customers have more money, but if companies could use a specific criteria like "high-return customers" rather than a prejudice like "Only Silicon Valley customers will understand", that would be nice.
1. Beta version. You can't use this in production, send reports to clients, etc. when this tool is in beta. A client gets this report and expects all future reports to be this pretty, but Google might just kill it off or it could break.
2. Limited to 5 reports. The majority of agencies/brands can't afford the $100k+ a year for premium G suite. 5 reports per account kind of sucks, and I've had to use old google accounts to get past that limit.
3. Design. Most people simple aren't good at design, so you need a designer to create a good number of templates. Users cannot stray away from templates unless they know what they are doing. While its easy to use, its easy to make things look bad too.
4. You can pull from a Google Sheets, but updating that sheets doesn't play nicely with data studio.
Side ux notes.. changing pages resets the date range which is annoying. Choosing custom colors for some charts doesn't always work.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/1SCUNu1.jpg
powerBI cloud has a free tier and does not require a subscription to try afaik: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
in either case, you can work with spreadsheets stored on your computer, but in any case just like Google, you'd have to upload it to work with it.
the pro version doesn't tie you to O365 either even though it uses the same platform
Edit: Nevermind, I left the page, came back and things worked(?)
I have no connection to the app, other than I've tried dozens like it, including Google's Data Studio.
Why is this still a thing any more? Even more this is a product of a single company so no legacy licensing scheme (like for movies for instance) can be blamed :(