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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..

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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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