This is really nice, specially the pdf report generation.<p>I feel very moronic making a dashboard for any products now. Enterprise customers prefer you integrate into their ERPs anyway.<p>I think we lost the plot as an industry, I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations. This should've been the standard 10 years ago and it's case is only stronger in this age of LLMs.<p>We get so involved with our products we forget that our customers are humans too. Nobody wants another account to manage or remember. Analytics and alerts should be push based, configurable reports should get auto generated and sent to your inbox, alerts should be pushed via notifications or emails and customers should have an option to build their own dashboard with something like this.<p>Sane defaults make sense but location matters just as much.
100% agreed regarding shipping a read-replica, for any sufficiently complex enterprise app (ERP, CRM, accounting, etc.).<p>Customers need it to build custom reports, archive data into a warehouse, drive downstream systems (notifications, audits, compliance), and answer edge-case questions you didn’t anticipate.<p>Because of that, I generally prefer these patterns over a half-baked built-in analytics UI or an opinionated REST API:<p>Provide a read replica or CDC stream.
Let sophisticated customers handle authz, modelling, and queries themselves. This gets harder with multi-tenant DBs.<p>Optionally offer a hosted Data API, using something like -- PostgREST / Hasura / Microsoft DAB.
You handle permissions and safety, but stay largely un-opinionated about access patterns.<p>Any built-in metrics or analytics layer will always miss edge cases.<p>With AI agents becoming first-class consumers of enterprise data, direct read access is going to be non-negotiable.<p>Also, I predict the days of charging customers to access their own goddamn data, behind rate-limited + metered REST APIs are behind us.
> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.<p>Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].<p>In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.<p>In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.<p>Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports</a>
1999-2000, the company I worked with gave a smallish number of key users full read rights to the SAP minus HR, briefly after introducing SAP to the global supply chain of that company. The key users came from all orgs using SAP, basically every department had one or two key users.<p>I was part of this and "saw the light". We had such a great visibility into all the processes, it was unreal. It tremendously sped-up cross-org initiatives.<p>Today, I guess, only agents get that privilege.
Customers don’t want to learn your schema or deal with your clever optimizations either. If you expose a DB make sure you abstract everything away in a view and treat it like a versioned API.
hi, dev building Shaper here. I agree re sending reports vs dashboards.
Many users use Shaper mostly as UI to filter data and then download a pdf, png or csv file to use elsewhere.
We are also currently working on functionality to send out those files directly as messages using Shaper's task feature.
> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.<p>A layer on top of the database to account for auth/etc. would be necessary anyways. Could be achieved to some degree with views, but I'd prefer an approach where you choose the publicly available data explicitly.<p>GraphQL almost delivered on that dream. Something more opinionated would've been much better, though.