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Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch!

We use Metabase at our company (created and managed by a non developer). Can you share some reasons for us to switch to Plato?

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Of course. Metabase is the first product I recommend for easy BI, but Plato isn't a BI tool. It's an ops tool used for more "transactional" workflows.

Startups use us to diagnose support issues, track new user data for ops, extend user trials, manually update ML training sets, etc..

Terrible Idea to run this kind of tool on actually transactional data. In our startup we have pre-defined scripts so a non-dev's work is actually scoped. This is free range access to the database. Now not just dev can drop a database but also a business person can delete all data.

You want to scope access via a BI tool to the business person. That is data archtecture 101. And when the access is scoped a BI tool like metabase or superset services a better purpose than this.

I agree that open access is not always the right approach. Most of our users don't in fact run Plato with open access. Databases are read-only by default, and many provide write-access to only certain tables. We're also working on more features to scope access.

- Queries restricted to certain virtual tables, to avoid unintentional linear scans

- RBAC for scoping access

- An API client for hitting administrative endpoints rather than cells directly

Lots more on the way.

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