Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone | Hacker News Reader

Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone

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193 pointsselmat48 comments

Back when this product was announced and discussed on HN[0], one of the primary complaints was the 5-report limit that it imposed on free users. Having that lifted seems like it may make a lot of people happy.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415

Another complaint was lack of Postgres support. That was added a few weeks ago.

https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/01/the-new-google-data...

do enterprises [suppose to] use it? Both MySQL and Postgres connectors have this:

"Notes

Currently this connector does not support SSL. Be careful with the data you send.

If you database is behind a firewall, you will need to open access to the following IP addresses so that Data Studio can access your database:

64.18.0.0/20

64.233.160.0/19

[... cut 10 other addresses ...]

216.239.32.0/19"

Be careful with the data you send

How exactly did this make it into a public Google release?

This is a good start, but for those not entirely embedded in the ecosystem, it's unreasonable to expect exposing a Postgres DB without SSL. I'll stick with Tableau for now.

this. exactly this.

It's really great to see useful software like this becoming freely available but I do sometimes worry about the effect big players like Google have on niche markets like this. Any company building products in this space are about to feel the squeeze as their potential customers instead pick the free option.

Small products inside of a big company don't have to be independently viable. It seems like the natural conclusion to this setup, whether intentional or not, is that the big companies create monopolies in these niches by pricing out the competition. That's great for the consumer while everything's free and there are still alternatives. I'm not sure how this will play out in the long run though.

It just comes down to specialization. The BI tools that succeed will be the ones that offer features that Google will never pursue. A perfect example would be Looker's LookML[0] - companies that don't need that sort of functionality will be fine with Google Data Studio. But if you need that functionality (and it is very, very nice) - you'll pay Looker.

https://looker.com/

Looker makes Google cloud customers very happy. The Data studio announcement changes nothing.

(Work on Google cloud big data)

But who's to say that Google will never pursue this market too?

Google doesn't really excel at markets such as Looker's.

We happily pay for Looker and get excellent support from them.

It'd take many, many years of hearing success stories with Google before I'd even consider moving off of Looker on to a competitive product by them and even then the switching costs would unlikely to ever be worth it.

Sort of how Google pays for a quantum computer while building a new one? ;-) Today the Tableaus of the world grow the market, but I think they'll naturally consolidate under bigger umbrellas.

I bet Microsoft is watching Google's moves here closely. Just as MS grew from Excel to PowerBI and AzureML etc., Google's cloud initiative would naturally grow from Spreadsheets to something like the above. Single-service startups and even the Tableaus of the world may be temporary noise: the $xxB goal is instead getting more gravity than AWS and MS for cloud data workflows. The monopoly play is create good-enough analytics software, make it free on the dimensions smaller companies like Looker charge for, and undercut by instead bundling into overall Google/Azure/AWS deals. Commodify the market but get more of it.

We looked into BI a few years ago for where we should leverage our client/cloud GPU tech, and decided BI was an execution sprint to $100M and then bail. So, while I wish the best to my (smart!) colleagues at Looker, Periscope, MapD, etc., we decided to go another way. And... Worth mentioning, we're hiring! ;-) build@graphistry.

I feel like companies whose niche is tooling to analyze Google data are living on borrowed time as it is. I would assume that they would have some advantages beyond Google not being interested in their market, otherwise this kind of disruption seems inevitable.

I guess at least some of these types of companies are consultancy companies disguised as product companies? If that's the case they might not be affected too badly.

There is some truth to this, however Google Data Studio can also hook up to Postgres and Mysql data stores making it a bit more than Google-specific tooling.

It does create a tough market dynamic. I'm seeing this from both sides as a founder running a company that is competing with Google as well as when deciding which tools to run my business on.

The "what happens if Google comes into your market" threat is real. However, Google's size, bureaucracy, and poor support (they are making slow progress here) give smaller, more focused players the opportunity to out-innovate or simply offer an alternative to those wary of ecosystem lock-in.

It does make the little guys have to scrap a lot harder. In some cases it pushes technology forward. In others, the pricing pressure can starve innovative companies out of the game because "free*" is so compelling.

"Any company building products in this space are about to feel the squeeze"

We are feeling the heat at http://www.reportdash.com

Similar could be said for Microsoft and their PowerBI tool.

Cool! it's working here in Brazil.

As others commented, the lack of secure connection/need to expose corporate DBs will have many IT managers dismiss Data Studio. Hope Google adds secure connectors.

I'm working with a client using Data Studio as viz and Google Sheets as source, and the marketing people love looking at both.

What a blow to Amazon Quicksight!

I was just saying a couple of months ago what a game-changer the Quicksight pricing would be[0]. Next time data visualization comes up for me, my first move will be to compare these two options and see if Quicksight offers any additional benefits over Google Data Studio.

But I can happily say, I'll not have to have another conversation with my boss about adopting an expensive data visualization tool.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966351

Quicksight has been frustrating to work with to say the least. Generic error after error with no debugging info, poor integration with Athena, lacks the ability to plot data more granular than hourly, and with a max limit of 4 decimal precision accuracy. I guess if you're in sales it could be fine, but nowhere near ready for any serious analytics.

While Quicksight is game-changing in their pricing and trying to disrupt the usually-overpriced BI market (the same thing it did very successfully with Amazon Redshift and data-warehouse market), as the other comment pointed out their product is still not up-to-par with existing ones.

If you're looking for affordable BI platform for startup, check out Holistics [0] (note: I'm cofounder), we are very tech startup-friendly, and our pricing starts at $49/mo for up to 5 users. Our customers range from 3-person shop to 600+ person unicorn startup.

[0] https://www.holistics.io

Great news but it is NOT for everyone. Only a small number of countries have access to it

"Sign up for free"

You get up to 5 free reports. If you want to do this at a company level or larger teams, there is a link to contact sales.

> To enable more businesses to get full value from Data Studio we are making an important change — we are removing the 5 report limit in Data Studio. You now create and share as many reports as you need — all for free.

Not Free for Everyone, as it said, it is not available in your country! (Pakistan), looks like US only edition for now.

I could sign up just fine from here in India.

Sign up and checking out sample was also fine at my side. However it is when you try to select new Report/give data source ... then it says: Quote: "Data Studio is not available in your country. Would you like to be notified when the service is available?"

Google used to really innovate. Google Fusion Tables was terrific early on, for example. Gmail, where to even start in showing it with praise.

Google Data Studio overlaps Fusion Tables, Sheets, Chart Tools and dozens of products like Amazon Quicksight, BIME, Tabeau, Rodeo, etc.

I'd have liked to see Google apply its UI to an accessible machine learning studio, democratize the tech, and really break some ground.

For those who want on-premise google analytics datawarehouse should use this http://www.infocaptor.com/google-analytics-datawarehouse.php

Oh good, I was really looking for a way to insecurely ship all of my customers data to Google. This makes it super easy to lose all compliance controls I've worked years to build. A.K.A - They should have a hosted onsite version and, at the very least, not offer connectors without secure connections (like the postgres one). This tool is good for analyzing data already at Google (adwords, etc), but it is very poorly positioned to be useful for anything else.

Well Data studio runs on bigquery, among other things. Bigquery is soc,hipaa, PCI compliant, and is a part of the larger security strategy for Google. See [0].

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

That doesn't protect the data in transit from my production database. Only a secure connection can do that. It also doesn't solve the problem that I don't want to ship my production data to Google, or anyone else really, in the first place.

Correct, cloud products and services are not useful for folks who are not cloud friendly :)

its an SSL connection, doesn't that mean its encrypted in transit?

It's explicitly NOT SSL encryption.

Nothing is FREE! As if they're not going to mine everyone's data for their own use. I'm tempted, but I'm not going to. Thanks.

Have you read the TOS or are you just assuming that? Or do you think the stated privacy policies are not to be trusted?

Those who work with Data Studio -- how do you guys do ETL for it?

I bet it's not 'free' for richard stallman

Awesome! Datastore connector, please!! Cloud Datastore is the ideal NoOps and Serverless storage solution for projects from small to large. It would be great if you can build a connector for it.

Would it be easy to pump Cloud Datastore into Bigquery and then read from that? (genuine question)

You can load *.info Datastore backups into BigQuery tables natively. You could probably write up a quick apps script to automate data refreshes it if you wanted.

Still not the same as reporting directly from a live datastore though :)

That's exactly my issue. I have a crawler that collects data and stores into Datastore. I need to periodically scoop up the snapshots and export them into BigQuery, then run the visualizations. I want my visualization to be live and also don't want the overhead of scooping the data.

Using App Engine, I schedule task queue tasks to insert rows into a BigQuery table on the fly [1].

It only works for inserts, though.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigque...

Thanks! And yes, as you mentioned, the problem is that it works only for inserts. I use Datastore as my primary database. So requesting for supporting Datastore from Datastudio.

I would try a Cloud Dataflow streaming job. Both Datastore and Bigquery have "IO" connectors in Dataflow.

Not available in Sweden.

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